This is more from a lot of coal power plants being converted to gas over the past 20 years than solar overtaking the outputs of those power plants. Coal output shrinking, solar output rising, the lines have crossed.
Coal is unpopular in all but a few areas where coal mining is still a part of the local econonmy. I used to work near a coal plant and every day I'd go out to my car and it would have little black particles all over it. Nobody likes that, no matter what the President says.
Total electricity produced by coal + gas is down over the last 20 years. Total electricity production is up, the difference is from wind and solar.
This administration swapped to actively suppressing Wind and Solar via tariffs etc, and yet the trends continued because the underlying economic reality heavily favors battery backed solar.
I think that's part of what's notable about this. The administration hasn't been able to reverse the trend despite putting a massive thumb on the scale against projects like offshore wind and tariffs on solar panel imports.
There's probably a delay in the effects though since projects started before they took office are probably starting to thin out and finish up. We'd have to look into the permitting of new projects or wait for to see how big the decline in new capacity turns out to be in a couple years.
A lot of comes from state initiatives too. Texas being conservative also happens to be very pro solar. I’m in the business and we have some great projects there. The US military is also pushing solar at their facilities. Then you have many private-state partnerships like tolls investing a lot in solar. The outlook in general is pretty positive in the US, a lot more than what people would think.
Anyone who still even views this as a conservative/liberal issue, is someone who is in the pocket of the fossil fuel lobby. Solar is simply a very cheap and realiable way to generate electricity. Much cheaper than gas and coal nowadays. Pure economic incentive is going to continue to drive its adoption.
As someone from another continent, I giggle when I see doomsday-prepping anti-govmint fiercely-independent cowboys hating EVs and loving gas.
Gas has a 6-month shelf-life, and is attached to a whole geopolitically volatile military-industrial complex. Meanwhile an EV + solar can be actually self-sufficient and last for a decade or two. A realistic Mad Max would have been EV battles over solar panels.
this’ the other Max from China, where they be scavenging leftover panels. The Mad Max we know surely happens somewhere else, and perhaps near Texas given all the participating parties…
I also recall a New York times article from many moons ago suggesting that a lot of Texas oil wealth got repurposed into a large-scale wind energy infrastructure, but my info might be out of date.
It's sort a "broken clock right twice a day" thing, but I agree with not doing offshore wind in the US.
The divergence immediately follows in that I wish they would just push onshore wind.
It's sort of a circular issue, it's madly expensive because we haven't built a lot and aren't super good at it, and we don't get much of it built because we aren't great at it and it always is ludicrously expensive.
The US has a uniquely underdeveloped maritime sector, we don't build a lot of the massive turbines you use offshore.
You drive through central and west texas, it feels like there might be more wind turbines than people.
We've kind of already made the decision based on what works.
Ocean winds are strong and predictable in ways that are really beneficial to the wind farms so the extra costs are balanced out by the fact that there's always a strong usable wind to harness too.
Also the "we're bad at this because we don't do the so we can't do this" is throwing away a great project and solution because of a temporary problem. Once we start doing it in significant numbers we'll rapidly get better at doing it too.
I think the idea of offshore wind is nice. There is a lot of ocean out there and by putting the "ugly" (I don't mind them.) turbines out of sight we get the best of both worlds.
But the realities of the idea - the engineering - is problematic.
The ocean is a harsh environment and maintaining something deliberately put out of the way in a harsher environment is far more expensive.
There are a lot of ocean, but limited shores. I guess that's the only economical place to build it, but of course it blocks scenery. If people truly built it in open ocean, less people will complain.
Tariffs on solar panel imports should stimulate domestic solar panel production, but only when they are high enough and applied long enough to justify investments into new solar panel manufacturing facilities.
You can do it with targeted tariffs with assurances they'll last but these broad tariffs make it harder to get the base materials you need to build the panels out of in the first place plus they're so crazy they're almost guaranteed to be wiped out in a few years if not sooner so as a manufacturer they don't have the confidence that the cost equalization of the tariffs will be around long enough to not bankrupt them.
Another way to do it would be guaranteed buys for electrifying military etc and grants for projects using US made cells instead of foreign ones that could also effectively subsidize local production.
It's like a lot of things done by this administration they do it such hamfisted and obvious ways that they don't accomplish their nominal goals. See a lot of the court cases where they've been blocked in implementation because they said the quiet part out loud. eg: it's usually REALLY hard to prove malicious prosecution but they keep saying out loud "we're prosecuting this person in retaliation for their protected activities".
It's especially notable because there isn't just the thumb against offshore wind, solar panel tariffs, and even EVs. Chinese EVs can't be imported because of tariffs and many conservative states a pretending that EV drivers "don't pay their fair share because they don't buy gas" - except most gas taxes haven't been adjusted in multiple decades and don't even begin to pay for the cost of maintaining roads. Fuel taxes are a tiny portion of any state revenue.
There has always been a massive thumb on the scale in the form of tax breaks, direct subsidies (billions a year alone on this), land leasing, etc for fossil fuels and their use. Favorable public policy. And what the IMF calls implicit subsidies - the cost of impact on the climate/environment and people's health.
When a refinery is pumping out pollution and everyone in the area is getting sicker than people in similar areas - that costs us as insurance ratepayers and taxpayers.
Unfortunately this is one of the few cases where both sides are close to the same -- they both chose to heavily tariff foreign EVs. Something to remember when Democrats talk about climate change.
"closer to the same" except one side has consistently promoted the building and sale of EVs in America.
If you were feeling generous you could credit then with the entire existence of modern EVs given their support of the nascent industry for decades in California.
But sure, let's focus on the mote in Democrat eyes and ignore the insanity across the aisle. That's what got us into this situation, so why stop now.
It's the same in the UK. The CfD "subsidy" mechanism for solar power results in the solar farms paying us money almost every day - including today - but you will still see right wing politicians vow to eliminate this "subsidy".
I doubted what you wrote, but everything you said is correct (for the last 10 years, at least). Over the time period, natural gas increased 740 TWh/year (to 1870) and coal decreased 940 TWh/year (to 650). Electricity production is up ~7%, but that's quite low compared to the growth of everything else.
> This administration swapped to actively suppressing Wind and Solar via tariffs etc
Biden's administration put on solar tariffs, but of course I'll grant the current administration is fucking up everything else possible.
Plenty of blame to go around, my understanding of the timeline is:
Trumps first administration put in solar Tariffs with China (25%), Biden administration increased them with China (50%), 2nd Trump administration increased those and applied solar Tariffs to other countries. Though honestly I’ve largely stopped paying attention at this point.
I think the issue is that the tarriffs just don’t really matter anymore because the panels are so cheap that they’re dwarfed by the “balance of system” costs — installation, racking, inverters, cabling, etc.
As a foreigner it just seems.so braindead that the administrations would tarrif solar panels. The US doesnt have a great manufacturing capacity for solar panels compared to established manufacturers. The high cost of new production ensures slow uptake.
From a place that embraced solar rebates, and has subsequently benefited from having in place solar battery rebates, we have a thriving industry of solar installers, electricians, and an ever increasing amount of local grid energy security in the event that storms or accidents cause supply disruptions. About 5% of households will likely not see an energy bill for the next 20 years. Another 40% have solar that covers daytime energy requirements.
The requirement for baseline coal.and gas has been decreasing - though will not completely abate.
I live in a state that produces abundant coal for power and steel. We have decreased our carbon emissions to 35% below 2005 levels.
It’s also from focused efforts to close coal plants, and rapid, massive deployment of solar in the last 20 years, and new technology emerging (better batteries and dispatch technologies) to make solar into a 24/7 resource.
For whatever reason, there’s a strong motivation for people to dismiss the gigantic global effort to transition the energy system away from fossil fuels, and claim that all that effort isn’t really doing anything. Thankfully, this is not true — determined people can change things for the better.
It’s true, and the strategy of climate activists in the early 2000s and 2010s was to do everything they could to make coal and other fossil fuels as expensive as possible: by reducing access to capital, increasing the cost of legal and regulatory hurdles, sometime delaying projects through physical blockades, etc etc.
Some utilities didn't have direct market pressures to close coal because they were regulated and the regulator allowed them to recover costs plus a profit on top.
> For whatever reason, there’s a strong motivation for people to dismiss the gigantic global effort to transition the energy system away from fossil fuels, and claim that all that effort isn’t really doing anything.
Because renewable energy is Communism, or something.
But seriously: $$$$. The Fossil Fuel industry, before it finally dies, will make big Tobacco look downright merciful. The owners of these companies and their media co-conspirators should be tried in the Hague for what they have done to our planet just to keep making fucking money.
> The Fossil Fuel industry, before it finally dies, will make big Tobacco look downright merciful.
This should not be surprising when one realizes that this industry is the biggest industry that humanity ever created (in terms of monetary value). Nothing ever is or was bigger than energy from fossil fuels. Predictably, those who profit from this, behave like selfish [...] and fight tooth and nail to keep their profits.
I would disagree, I think that plentiful affordable energy has been a huge benefit to the human race. Transportation, refrigeration, manufacturing, simply having electricity in the home, most everything we take for granted in terms of our current standard of living traces back to abundant and cheap energy.
But there is no reason to hang on to the old, dirty technology if there are now better alternatives. And if the economics work, the market will follow, as it seems to be doing. You can't fake lower costs.
Nuclear should have replaced coal decades ago but the economics didn't actually work, even though the environmental benefit would have been real.
Oh for fucking sure. I consider humans as much a part of the planet as anything else, but also very valid to call it out specifically.
Mass death of species too numerous to name, the biosphere itself, property damage from rising ocean levels, the soon to fail air currents, all the damage and death from extreme weather events, all of it. All of it could've been fucking prevented and it wasn't, because profits.
That's a link to a global chart. The OP is talking about the US. It's not surprising that countries that have to import natural gas are moving away from it and countries with plentiful local suppliew are doubling down on it.
Saying that this is more gas than coal is certainly not the case borne out by the numbers, even in the US, the one place where gas is as cheap as dirt due to it being a by-product of fracking.
> have little black particles all over it. Nobody likes that, no matter what the President says.
Should you live near one of those big noisy "freeway" things you may note the little black particles over everything in the surroundings but nobody likes to tear down the interstate.
First, I live 150 yards from a major freeway - I-90 in WA, it's three lanes in each direction here. There are no tiny black particles over everything in surroundings, and my outdoors AQI (from my own sensor) is normally in single digits and basically only ever gets above 50 if it's wildfire smoke or the neighbors are burning something.
But second, if we developed a reliable and cheap way to, say, teleport people over long distances, why not tear it down?
Note the use of 'may'; the details of the car-hell vary. Perhaps the I-90 pollution instead spills into the lake and then bioaccumultes into larger organisms, Bon Appétit! My anecdote was a bit southwesterly of the I-5 bridge where there was, besides the horrific noise pollution, definitely a greyish black soot to clean off everything. A fine result of rolling a natural one and automatically failing the skill check for "copy the autobahn", probably.
As to why some beings need to be whisked hither and yon with such haste, and thus spend quite a bit of time (and energy) trying to be somewhere, anywhere else, well, are they hungry ghosts? Or maybe they min/maxed for wizard and ended up with only three points in wisdom?
Some of these plants are being retrofitted for dual firing. They can burn coal & natural gas at the same time. I wonder how that factors into these statistics.
LFPs are cheap and safe, with very good cycle counts.
Sodium seems to be actually hitting real commercial production volumes (ex - GM just announced a sodium ramp up days ago, CATL has been producing them for a while). I expect we'll see sodium mature a good bit over the next decade (right now - it's just not quite as good as LFP, but it has a lot of promise in temperature extremes and cheap input materials)
So sure - storage is an issue. But it's not THE issue anymore. It costs surprisingly little to get enough LFP storage to cover an entire house at modest usage for days at a time (ex - under 10k for 42.9KWh of storage, UL approved https://signaturesolar.com/eg4-wallmount-all-weather-lithium...)
So yes - storage remains something to consider. But I think pretending that storage is a constraint that should stop PV rollout is... cough... bullshit cough...
Let industry that needs it pull from existing generation at night, convert residential to solar as fast as possible. Subsidize residential battery rollout the same way we do for insulation and other efficiency improving home improvements (which to be clear - we were doing prior to the current admin).
China isn't fucking around on the solar front, and the continued excuses in US from entrenched interests tangled up in the oil industry are criminal.
I suspect sodium is better than lithium today. The win is that sodium is much more forgiving of high temperatures so they can be run without cooling fans/pumps. Lithium battery installations are actually loud owing to all of their cooling infrastructure.
No cooling means the sodium batteries are easier/cheaper to maintain (no mechanical failures). Maybe not as energy dense, but you could still come out ahead long term when accounting for Capex+Opex.
You can't really get them in the sort of energy density you need for an ESS at any comparable price to LFP right now, so they only really make sense in really limited spots.
Right now, it's older generations of the chemistry, and you end up paying twice as much for half the power. So yeah... unless you really need the temperature extremes, it makes a lot more sense to stick with LFP.
But CATL at least is claiming they have cells in the pipeline for this year that get NA+ down to comparable $/KWh as LFP, and then yes - I'd much prefer to use the newer chemistry.
If sodium follows the same trend as LFP did, they'll get much cheaper at scale, and performance will go up markedly over the next 15 years. I won't be at all surprised to see them end up completely dominating the space in the long run, but we're not yet at the spot where they're better than LFP (at its most mature).
Peak Energy already has 3MWh units deployed (first deployment in July 2025) and more sales on the books. Yes, they are laughably low volume vs the established lithium BESS, but it is happening and you can at least get in the queue. They are hoping to open a US plant in 2027.
I think it's your last point that's actually the strongest.
There's always gaps between theoretical and practical, but to see China investing so hard in the future while the US digs in it's heels is infuriating.
The price of energy sets a floor on the price of all manufactured goods. By kneecapping the cheapest sources of energy, the regime kneecaps all domestic manufacturers.
China's aggressive buildout of cost effective energy production isn't because they're 'woke,' it's because it makes them more competitive. Every product they export at low prices is in part due to the their extremely cheap energy.
It's like the regime looked at the UK's collapsing manufacturing industry due to their high energy costs and said "I want that for us!"
I read some interesting things about crazy sounding technologies like vanadium flow and iron batteries. I think we're at most 10 years away from storage being not fully solved, but becoming an enabler more than a bottleneck.
No, storage (and transmission) are, in fact, THE issue. They always were. Solar is cheap and easy to install. Balancing a net zero grid without storage and with the pitiful transmission we have now is simply not possible. See: california.
The entire CAISO is a power laundering scheme to allow california to have publicly have huge amounts of solar power that overproduces enormously (including strongly negative power prices for a good chink of day) and still import dirty base load power quietly.
If storage was simple to solve, it would be solved. Chemical storage simply doesn't exist at the required scale and we don't like to build the one thing that we could, right this second - pumped storage.
We are already massively overbuilding solar. We would be well serv d to stop building panels and start building pump storage and transmission lines to distribute the stuff we've already got, but nobody makes a political career announcing a new transmission line.
California solar curtailment down 12% on back of batteries - https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2025/07/22/california-solar-curt... - July 22nd, 2025 ("For the first five months of 2025, CAISO data showed solar electricity curtailment declined by 12% as a share of generation, falling from 13% to 11.5%, even as solar output grew 18% year over year. During this period, however, curtailment still rose 4.1% in absolute terms, with March showing a 28% increase, matching the prior year’s peak.")
> In 2024, California and Nevada led the nation in solar power, becoming the first states to surpass 30% annual solar share, with California hitting 32% and Nevada 31% – the highest shares of any state. But the transition is uneven – while some states are surging ahead, others are just beginning to see significant growth.
> Batteries are essential for the rise of solar, allowing solar to meet growing demand and displacing gas and coal generation. Across the US, the growth of batteries is accelerating alongside solar, with 1 MW of storage being added for every 3 MW of solar added in 2024.
Contrary to popular belief, solar panels don't generate zero power on cloudy days.
They typically generate 10-25% of their maximum output on the cloudiest of days. Most cloudy days are not maximally cloudy.
We don't need solar panels everywhere to get even close to ~100% renewables (with nuclear, wind, new geothermal, and hydro). The areas where you put them are distributed enough that it would be exceptionally rare to ever encounter a meaningful need to ration.
So, storage is an issue, but not as big of an issue as most people think, and we do not generate anywhere near enough solar energy for it to be a reasonable concern yet...
There's also more solutions than just conventional batteries. There's pumped hydro, etc...
> They typically generate 10-25% of their maximum output on the cloudiest of days. Most cloudy days are not maximally cloudy.
If you're at higher latitudes, this is notably less of a drop-off than you see between high/low season.
My friends with residential solar see <10% overall output in January vs July. (~60% drop from fewer sunshine hours, ~80% drop from decreased solar irradiance.)
This gets complex quickly, because temperature matters too: cells are more efficient when they are cold. These effects interact and the results are sometimes surprising.
Many pure-numbers theoretical comparisons also make the assumption that you can consume all the power that the cells generate, which is not always the case. In an off-grid installation with a battery, for example, you might not be able to consume everything, depending on the month of the year. Practical example: my installation gets some of peak usage numbers in March/April, because that's when it's still cold and I use the power for heating. The cells are cold, I need the power, and there is some sunshine, all this combines. It's not obvious.
Yeah, I mean these aren't entirely theoretical, like observationally, people I know locally are getting <10% January vs July generation - I'm working backwards to get the relative proportion of the drops due to solar hours vs irradiance.
They all have a relatively generous (I think - I'm not especially familiar with policies anywhere else) grid policy where they sell back any over-production in the summer. (They switch between summer/winter rates, so in the summer they buy/sell at ~35c/kWh and in the winter they buy/sell at ~8c/kWh. These rates are only effective as long as you don't have a net-surplus of generation in the year, so it doesn't make sense economically to oversize the system for more winter generation, as then you'll be generating more in the summer than you can use or sell back.)
Curtailment and dump loads are pretty straightforward, though, so using all the power isn't as critical as people might imagine either.
It's better to overbuild the dc-to-ac ratio moderately and just accept that on a summer noon you'll be dumping or curtailing, and still get useful percentages in the winter. I'm in the fortunate position of having an essentially infinite dump load (water pumping and heating) that would effectively turn most of my solar into real usage, but even most people can preheat a hot water tank and things like that. With electric cars it's even better.
One of Standard Thermal's use cases is excess DC power from existing solar farms that would otherwise be curtailed because of inverter/interconnect limits.
There's also the angle of the sun to consider, it changes quite a bit in higher latitudes between summer and winter so if you want maximum efficiency you need to tilt the cells accordingly. But I don't think most residential solar does that.
And people use less energy at night. Yes, they do need heating/cooling and a few other things at night, but the peak is during the day and in the evening.
This argument is almost closed at this point, with PV + batteries being quite price competitive. We're no longer in 2018.
The main load is during the day when the sun shines anyway, and then the seasonally changing periods before and after, basically ramping when people are getting up, then dropping off while people are going to bed. On the west side of a continent, the power for the ramp can come from the east because the sun shines earlier there; on the west the sun shines later and the east can get power. At night, there are still nuclear and other plants, and it is very foreseeable that installations of ground battery technology will have been in place well before twentieth century plants are retired.
High load in the day during sunlight is mostly true for summer heat, but in the winter you have cold evenings which requires base load or storage, combined with solar angle/efficiency being worse in the winter.
Actually, the US uses more power during the day in the summer - there is a dropoff in the night for both summer and winter. Night time use is somewhat similar. [1]
Cooling takes more energy than warming, so the summer daytime use is higher. Summer = warm evenings. I'm from Indiana - it was almost always cooler at 10am than 7pm, even in the winter. It takes time to heat up or cool down. I'll also mention that nights and weekends use less power because business and industry tend to shut down during these times.
Which would somewhat logically mean that despite the efficiency being worse during winter, it isn't as much of a strain because power demands are less.
Cooling doesn't really take more energy than warming, because cooling is warming if you have a heat pump. Are you not just observing here the usage of fossil fuels for heating, which is extremely common?
How common are heat pumps in the states now - and is this something your average worker can afford? I looked into it some time before I moved - and before they were as popular - and installation costs were prohibitive. Moved to Norway over a decade ago. Heat pumps are popular but most homes don't have them here, especially in the cities. I can't imagine that rentals are upgrading, considering its rare to even update insulation in the cheapest rentals.
Are heat pumps common for factories and offices, which account for a lot of energy usage during the week?
Anywhere they aren't common, cooling generally is going to require more traditional methods and the energy cost is greater than just heating. If it were the other way around, poor folks would use a window air conditioner to heat. Cooling pretty much always creates warming - which is the reason it is vented outside.
The energy use I linked to doesn't actually consider where the energy comes from - just the use itself. These methods aren't going to use more or less energy depending on where the energy comes from. Heat pumps would make less usage due to efficiency.
Heat pumps are in most new construction in major cities now - Seattle's required them for years, other cities do too. They aren't significantly more expensive than any other method now, especially with a lot of local utility rebates.
Not quite, current nighttime load is largely a function of cheaper nighttime rates. People don’t set their EV’s to charge from 11-5AM because that’s the only time their cars are plugged in. If rates crater at noon on Sunday, there’s many an EV happy to suck up power then.
So yes batteries are going to continue to grow rapidly, but it’s a smaller role than it might seem.
Great, so now not only is power production nondeterministic, your cars tank also is. It was too expensive and the algorithm decided to wait charging, so no spontaneous road trip for you, sorry.
As an electric car owner, this is absolutely the biggest non-problem ever. If you're planning a long journey, you push one button at some point over the preceeding week and it charges to full regardless of price.
There’s nothing non deterministic about cheaper daytime rates as you scale solar production. Net result, lower average electricity prices but a slow rise in nighttime rates across decades.
Similarly people respond to price changes, that’s the foundation for how capitalism functions. You don’t need to care, but many people will choose to save money when possible.
I mean, assuming you don't zero your charge out when returning home, you could just take a few minutes to use a rapid charger part way through the journey...
The whole point about modern gas/coal plants is that it's relatively cheap to shut them down and start them up again. They are backup power, not for providing inflexible base load. Batteries + renewables are taking a lot of market share and flexible backup power is much more important than baseload (inflexible power like nuclear)
Starting up a coal-fired power station depends heavily on the plant's current temperature, taking anywhere from 2 to 48 hours to reach full operational capacity. Because of massive metal boilers and turbines, the heating process must be slow to prevent severe thermal fatigue and equipment damage. [1, 2]
The startup time is broken down by the plant's previous state:
• Hot Start (less than 8 hours offline): 2 to 4 hours. The boiler and equipment are still warm, allowing for a relatively quick resumption of steam production.
• Warm Start (8 to 120 hours offline): 4 to 8 hours.
• Cold Start (More than 120 hours offline): 12 to 48 hours. The plant must be heated from room temperature, which involves initially burning expensive natural gas or diesel just to safely warm the furnace and metal pipes before coal can be introduced. [1, 3, 5]
To explore how these heavy thermal operations impact the broader electricity supply, you can review the U.S. Energy Information Administration's grid reliability data or dive deeper into the technical challenges via the Environmental Protection Agency's Coal Startup Report. [6]
If you are interested in the broader power market, let me know:
True, but battery advancements are ongoing at a rapid pace. Sodium-ion is now viable and will be a mainstay in grid storage. Ignoring ideology, this path is plain cheaper than anything else.
It's not, grid-scale batteries are being deployed all over the world, and newer batteries keep getting better and cheaper. Storage hasn't been the issue for years.
To be fair, it depends if you were looking at "price/unit" or "sum of factory output".
The former, even a few years ago, I agree. The latter, people were arguing about a year or two ago. (Though your point remains as the trend was clear).
Solar is already by far our cheapest source of energy. As solar expands, the learning rate means solar will be even cheaper. We should expect solar to be the single largest source of energy on earth by 2035.
A shame electricity is not the whole picture when it comes to energy. The resurgence in EV sales off the back of high gas prices is awesome, but almost 100% of bulk transport costs still rely on oil. Also, unlike EV's which can be plugged in at home for most of their needs, bulk-transport will require considerable new infrastructure to make the transition. Still a way to go.
It's a couple of months since I did the calculations, but I do believe 2035 is for all energy, not just electricity.
It's easy to drag out a flat line in an exponential graph - but the line better start bending soon or we'll end up with a truly mind boggling amount of solar energy.
For people who are interested in this space should very much read EMBER. They make digestable, data rich reporting.
The latest 2025 summary report[0] has some great information, some top-level call-outs
- Solar power alone met 75% of the net increase in electricity demand. Together with wind, the two sources met almost all (99%) demand growth.
- For the first time since the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, and only the fifth time this century, fossil generation did not rise, recording a small fall of 38 TWh (-0.2%)
- For the first time in 100 years, renewables (33.8%, 10,730 TWh) overtook coal power (33.0%, 10,476 TWh) in the global electricity mix...
This is a great link. The most interesting feature of the solar graph is the amplitude of the seasonal variations. It looks like we typically generating ~100% more solar power in July than December.
If "we need to store solar energy from summer to winter" is indeed a significant issue, maybe you could use the extra power in summertime to make natural gas [1] and then store the gas until you need it in the winter.
Other than Alaska it’s almost certainly cheaper to just over provision solar panels and curtail excess generation in the summer months as solar panels are cheaper than batteries and grid connections.
To completely decarbonise we probably will need to eventually make liquid fuels for long distance air travel. But it may make more sense to do that nearer the equator to maximise the return on the capital investment by running it constantly rather than only during the summer.
Question for those in the know... See lots of press about balcony solar in Germany, and California recently introduced a bill to allow it (I'm guessing other states already allow it; not sure if the CA bill has a chance of becoming law). But how far are we from a more plug and play home solar system that becomes a primary energy source as opposed to a limited secondary source? And what are the issues with it actually becoming a reality? Is it primarily regulatory where government, utilities, installers would fight it tooth and nail to protect revenue and/or the grid? Is it a legit safety issue? I have to imagine safety could be easily addressed in terms of the power management between grid and solar (obviously these balcony units are relatively safe, but tiny in comparison). Installation perhaps has more safety issues (e.g., installing panels on a roof), but I just wonder if it's reasonable to think that a more robust plug and play option will become available or is even already available in certain places.
And I feel the need to say this, but this is the type of question I'd immediately turn to an LLM to answer, and I probably will ultimately, but I "still" like getting peoples' on-the-ground experience/expertise.
i think it’s kind of the opposite: balcony solar is good for power companies in the same way that them asking you to turn off your lights is good for power companies: if each customer is using less overall power they can serve more customers with existing infra.
that obviously depends on time of use and the sun etc, but balcony solar in the USA can’t come fast enough. my electricity in NYC is almost $.40/kWh, a limited secondary source is still huge
it makes a lot of sense to me as someone who has casually researched as a way to make the load of an A/C vanish from the perspective of my utility, but i can’t see regulations catching up nationwide soon.
any real microinverters can detect the grid being down and shut off to prevent zapping people working on power lines, but the complexities of split-phase power (you can consume on one leg but backfeed on the other leg rather than consume what you generate, which is bad for billing etc) and risks of intra-circuit overload will all freak out americans.
we put outlets absolutely everywhere because of how scared we are of extension cords, there’s an education and “am i going to start an electrical file” consumer sentiment obstacle to widespread adoption in the US
That definitely sounds reasonable for balcony, but I was trying to ask if you were able to generate the lion's share of your usage from a DIY or plug and play system would the utilities be against that? I would think so because that would eat into their profits. If enough people were knocking several cents per kWh off their bills, would they just end up charging more for the infrastructure to make up for the loss? I'm sure there's some happy medium where they'd be happy, as you say, but at some number I'm guessing they'd fight back against too much adoption.
> my electricity in NYC is almost $.40/kWh, a limited secondary source is still huge
This alone would be incredible from wider adoption of balcony (incredible for the consumer I mean). If you knock a few cents per kWh off, which I think you can do with daytime/early evening usage (when the panels are still producing some energy so no storage required) that would be fantastic. Baby steps to a full system that you can DIY without anyone objecting.
> If enough people were knocking several cents per kWh off their bills, would they just end up charging more for the infrastructure to make up for the loss?
Traditional residential electric utility billing puts a lot of emphasis on usage, but when there's a lot more residential solar, that ends up not reflecting the costs very well. I think, over time, you'll see things where you pay a distribution fee per kWh in either direction, and then also pay for energy input and get paid for energy output. You might also see a demand charge that scales with your connection size or your maximum load/generation. If you don't have local generation with export, everything kind of mushes into the usage charge, especially if it's tiered... but when you exporting with net metering, you pay the same bill for exporting 950kWh and importing 1000kWh as someone who imports 100kWh and exports 50kWh, but one customer is using the grid a lot more than the other.
You see something like that with California's NEM 3.0 tarrif setting export price to the 'avoided cost' instead of offsetting import one for one. Under NEM 3.0, the utility is disincentivizing using production credits as long term storage. They prefer you use or store your energy onsite; if you can export while costs are high, that's nice too.
Seems reasonable if you want to be connected to it.
The grid costs a significant amount of money to build and maintain, and maintaining the available capacity to serve you electricity even if you only use it a couple months of the year (or even a couple days of the year) still costs money.
If you don't want to be connected to it at all - then I mostly feel you shouldn't be mandated to be.
Yep, totally, and I'd personally be overjoyed if I could pay PG&E (hypothetically; they're not my utility) $24/month to keep the grid afloat, but no more than that because I'm producing all I need locally (at the risk of repeating myself, I know this is possible today. Just hopeful that over time it becomes possible to do that install in a plug and play fashion just like you can do with the balcony solar, but at whole-house scale (or at least some material fraction of the whole house usage)).
Hope this ends up being true, and that solving it in advance is not required because that would mean the utilities would not have pushed back. I just feel like they will unfortunately. But baby steps with the balcony seems like we're heading in the right direction. Just wish we'd move faster.
In power grids the system must be able to handle peak loads for weeks at a time. Either it will shed loads (aka shut off electricity) or things will explode. A black start cannot be allowed to happen as it would be catastrophic
Peaks don't last for weeks, but yes: Load must sometimes be shed.
That happens today. It will happen tomorrow. It's imperfect. This imperfect nature doesn't mean that progress must cease, or that all things must be forever maximalized in search of perfection.
i think that is an overly simplistic axiom: the utilities must cover a fixed asset base (poles and wires and transformers), pretty much regardless of how much or whether a household consumes from the grid.
the less the utility recoups via billing for energy usage, the bigger the deficit to cover their fixed network costs.
they are frequently interested in having you consume energy, to help defray those costs, especially where the marginal cost of the energy is very low.
the more users who disconnect, the more the fixed costs must be recouped from a shrinking customer base, triggering more incentive to leave the network. this is called the death spiral.
In addition, things like balcony solar don't save them cost: it introduces complexity because they need to safely manage that load, they need to be able to predict and measure it; in my experience working with utilities and network operators for many years, they flat out don't want these distributed generation sources unless they have a lot of say in how they are added to the grid, and how users can be charged for the privilege of generating their own power. that is often a very significant barrier to regulatory change.
that’s true, i was considering only the perspective of the major city i live in rather than networks with lower ratepayer densities where the economics are probably totally different
i do think “fully consumed or gated to never backfeed balcony solar at scale” is all i’m referring to, which i naively hope is a smaller regulatory change than backfeeding
> I do think “fully consumed or gated to never backfeed balcony solar at scale” is all i’m referring to, which i naively hope is a smaller regulatory change than backfeeding
I though the point of these systems was you plug them in to your wall socket and they lower your electricity bill. If you want to avoid tieing to the grid you can't have such a simple deployment.
Regulation aside, a significant issue is physical area. Most people won’t have access to enough area in the right direction to make it a primary source.
There’s a legit grid stability issue for solar in general, balcony or no.
Usage varies second by second, so the grid relies on physical inertia in the form of rotating turbines. Panels have no inertia; therefore, the more you have the less stable the grid gets.
That is however something which can be fixed by grid-scale batteries. Or home systems, for that matter, if they have batteries and some equivalent of Victron’s PowerAssist.
(Which limits the rate at which power draw can change. Very useful when you use a house-sized generator; it amounts to synthetic inertia. I have a 7kW generator, but a 7kW step load would stall it.)
You would need supercapacitors, but you can make an inverter emulate inertia almost as well as flywheels, and more than well enough to not make a difference once you push the energy into a few kilometers of non-zero impedance grid.
Ah, this is why I come here. I had no idea that was the case. I feel like there was a story going around recently about how hard it is to restart some power generator if it gets knocked offline. Maybe it was about Hoover Dam now that I think about it (i.e., how bad it would be if the Colorado gets too low).
A standard rooftop solar install with micro inverters is already pretty much plug and play. Wiring it up is the easy part.
Even a more complex system with large centralized inverters and battery backup can be about as plug and play as a desktop computer if you use an all-in-one inverter/charger/controller.
The challenge is scale. You can't take 10kW of solar and plug it into an outlet. It requires more hardware and wiring than that.
I don't see anyone replying to you here, and I don't know what your background is in this, but I think and hope you're spot on here. The more I've read replies in this thread the more I think this is mostly regulatory and maybe slightly a hardware issue (hardware issue is that there needs to be some kind of plug on an electrical panel that would remove the risks of having to pull the face off the panel, install a new breaker and connect the inverter).
I've worked in clean energy for about a decade, building analytics software for DER providers (solar, batteries) and EV companies, and I build large-scale portable battery and solar systems as a hobby. I keep up with the industry and the regulatory environment closely via podcasts, newsletters, and conferences.
It can't be more or much more than the 800W as currently done in Germany because it would not be safe with the way electricity is delivered to a home.
The reason is: when you pull electricity from the grid, the fuse would blow if you tried to pull too much current (e.g. you connect four hair dryers on the same outlet). It blows to prevent the wiring in your home from overheating and catching on fire. With balcony solar, you plug it in your home outlet which is already behind the fuse, which means the fuse cannot react and cut off power if you try to feed in more than the capacity allows. You could be maxing out on the current you are pulling from the grid, and then on top of that you would be adding your balcony solar.
Why it's allowed at all in Germany and other places is because the fuse will blow above 10A and the wiring in the house is 16A, so there was always a buffer or overcapacity in the wiring, presumably just in case. So they allowed 800W of balcony solar which is roughly 3.5A and still there is some wiggle room left.
Also why pull from the grid at all: your appliances actually just use the electricity from the grid. In Germany and I guess most of Europe they run a three phase system, so your balcony solar might not be in the same physical circuit as your appliances in use. With balcony solar your meter just offsets your consumption with whatever you are feeding it at the moment. From the grid standpoint if you are running something using 800W and feeding in 800W, it's 0.
Of course it can work without this too, but this defeats the purpose of balcony solar, which is plug it in and it works simplicity.
Another limitation is the transport capacity of each power line and each transformer (power lines and transformers don't care for the direction of the electricity, only for the amount of electricity).
For example if each house in a city would have 25A fuse and all the houses would simultaneously draw 25A, or simultaneously supply 25A the grid would collapse.
Usually the Diversity Factor for apartment block electric grids is around 35%.
This is very interesting and helpful info! I guess my fantasy is that a standard electrical panel would eventually have a literal plug on it where you could plug a larger system in, just as you would an outlet in the balcony situation, and then it would I think be, using your word, in "front" of the "fuse" (using quotes because I'm not sure I have the behind/in front of language correct, and when you use fuse here in the states it would be a breaker, I guess, not an actual fuse). This solution would of course have to mitigate things like fire risk, or blowing up the house or grid itself. I'm just hopeful it's coming because I think the install rate would go through the, pardon me, roof.
The post you replied to isn't fully correct. I'll tell you how you could do this in many ways that prevents the fuse problem.
There's 3 ways to run solar.
Grid tied, grid backed and off grid.
I live on a farm and am off grid. The solar inverter is my "utility". After the inverter I have my main breaker. The inverter makes 5 kW max at 230 volts, so my fuse is 5000/230 = 20 amps.
I'm outside the US, regulation is a suggestion here everyone ignores. So many many houses have solar panels here to offset grid costs ($0.60 per kWh).
The main way we do it is make it grid backed. This means the inverter creates power that is in no way mixed with grid power. It forms a microgrid within the home. All ac's are connected to this. This can be done in the electrical panel as its just rerouting wires to fuses.
So then you have your 20A fuse behind the inverter, and smaller fuses (which you should already have) to your house loads. Btw you guys run 110v so your fuses are probably double the rating of ours.
When you do grid backed a battery is nice, since it helps prevent using the grid when a cloud passes by, it forms a bit of buffer. A 5kWh battery already helps. At night the grid powers the loads.
Grid-tied is the one nobody here uses, so you can feed back to the grid. This involves complicated electrical stuff so you don't electrocute the line workers. Plus it gets complicated with split phases and such.
Not to mention utilities pay less than what they ask you for the same kWh.
In the case of balcony solar you can feed the inverter utility power and connect your AC to the inverter. It uses solar power first and takes the needed diff from utility.
Know you don't want to dox yourself, but .6 is... rough. Like super rough. Would love to know where this is, but no pressure. Thankfully you're not relying on it completely. And oh what I wouldn't give to know the incidence of deadly maybe very-damaging electrical fires there given your well put "regulation is a suggestion here everyone ignores." Because if the incident rate is no worse than here you can make some assumptions that the regulations here are overly burdensome. I'd be remiss if I didn't say that regulations are oftentimes written in blood; it's true in the case of electrical generation, distribution, installation, but it's also a glib way to stand in the way of solutions that improve peoples' lives.
I think it's the reason why we ignore regulation. It's not really malice or greed, local government is just a mess. It takes months of waiting.
And when we "break the rules" we consider the rules and break them in a way that minimizes our liability.
Like the reason for the certified install is to protect the line workers. I live on an island, so that's basically my neighbours. Nobody wants them dead. Likewise nobody wants to go through bureaucratic hell.
Solution: grid-backed installs that doesn't interact with the grid. Which any Juan or Pedro can do if you don't want to do it yourself. It runs around $200 to add a new "electric group" to your house.
And to be fair the standard rate is 0.38 cents per kWh and some fixed rate. But the poor they force on the pre-paid package which has no fixed rate, but runs at that higher rate.
And so when you can't afford to buy the electricity you end up in the dark without giving the utility any moral obligations.
I live in the "Caribbean Netherlands", the largest island of the 3.
I imagine it could be done like thus, but it is not, there's no infrastructure like this, so it's a moot point. Balcony solar was allowed so it's a hassle free DIY solution. You also don't get any money for feeding into the grid, but because you save a lot of money on installation costs it's still worth it.
>how far are we from a more plug and play home solar system that becomes a primary energy source as opposed to a limited secondary source?
We don't need a more plug and play system. A zero agreement interconnection for whatever UL certified 300W-ish scale is fine and should be widely deployed.
There needing to be interconnection agreements with your utility and an inspection is not a blocker that needs to be removed. Most places require a licensed electrician for complex work, having the electrician fill out a form and having a utility inspection is how things should be.
Apologies if my reply here is not understanding you, but this is counter to my experience. Plenty of people still want to handle their own energy production even if they have grid access. I've built off-grid houses. Most of the utility production is already renewable. Many people still choose to live off grid even though that's the case. It would be epic if there was a plug and play, house-scale option because the cost of installation today is... epic (so epic in fact that the overall cost of install has actually gone up even though material costs have come down). Admittedly off-grid installs are a tiny fraction of places on the planet, but it's the trigger that led me to ask about this.
Perhaps you're just responding because I brought up grid tie (fair!), but I'm wondering why not aspire to remove the blocker, which would mean de-risking the installation so that laypeople could do it without having to get an electrician involved (which is what's so amazing about balcony).
If you want grid tie-in, a certified professional needs to be in the loop to verify all of the rules are being followed because incorrect setups are dangerous to other people. Also insurance probably doesn't want to insure your home if someone with questionable knowledge is setting up wiring and energy production.
Outside of cities, outside of grid tie, setting up your own micro-grid often can be done without any external intervention. You have to know things to do it though, I don't think it is a desirable state of things for just blind plug and play.
What you say is true, but do you not think there's a way to make it so that the risk is taken out of it so you can expand the number of people who are capable of doing the install? I mean, I personally think there is, but I respect you don't feel the same. I just end up with a $10,000 bill, for the labor, to do what seems to me like a very straightforward problem to solve.
We get Chinese solar panels here. $175 and produces 550 watt.
We then get Chinese MPTT inverters, always 2 if you run your fridge on it lol.
$350 ish for one. The 5kW model. It's all one and the same.
You need a minimum of 3 panels.
So for less than $1000 you have 1.5 kWh with no storage.
Connecting the panels requires some care to ensure you stay within the parameters all GPTs know. Two pictures is all it takes. The spec label of your panel and that of your inverter.
I can't stress enough how easy it is.
The output of your inverter is 1 phase power. You can route that anywhere in your house safely since houses have.. circuits. So once the circuited is moved to the inverters grid, its seperated.. at the circuit breaker.
The scariest part was driving a screw through my roof.
It's not straightforward. If you do it wrong you kill people. Your house burns down, you burn your neighborhood down, you electrocute utility workers doing maintenance, you contribute to grid instability which is already a tight balancing act.
Can you make plug and play possible? Sure but you're just shifting the verification to a different layer and then you have to make it illegal to posses or sell any thing but the safe engineered products and you have to spend a bunch on enforcement to make sure only the safe stuff gets put in practice (not to mention replacing all the existing hardware and making it illegal to maintain)...
Modern consumer products and safety rules insulate people so much from the dangerous parts of existence that people get bothered when everything isn't like that and then want to go pet the big stripey orange and black kitty... not realizing that guardrails and safety nets aren't everywhere in existence.
And putting up those guardrails is EXPENSIVE. You want those instead of professional installation costs? Sure but the solar system you bought just got 10x as expensive as a result saving you nothing.
A house costs what... $250-500k to build these days? $10k for a major update to the build is nothing. Requiring expertise to verify dangerous things are done correctly is appropriate.
Utah passed a balcony solar bill; I think they're the only ones so far. Oregon tried in the short session last year, but it got shut down by fire marshall type people, sadly.
Interesting on Utah. Re Oregon, was the fire Marshall acting in good faith in that scenario? Recently reading about fire-truck size in the US I start wondering what the motivation is for some views about things around fire safety (amongst a million other things). Maybe good faith is too cynical. Maybe just hard-to-change attitudes.
Firefighters are infamous for creating elevator regulations that require being able to rotate a stretcher, which lead to less elevators duet to the immense costs, which is both completely unnecessary and defeats the entire purpose of the regulations for safety since now they have to drag injured people down stairs
Its especially egregious because 2 stair builds are easily and often designed with more distance between stairs and rooms than single stair builds are.
Hah - I was going to mention all the other types of things the fire people seem to be blocking, but decided to stay focused. But yeah, it seemed like 'aversion to change'. "Firefighters might trip over solar panels on balconies" or something kind of far-fetched sounding.
This is funny. You might notice that I write insanely-long comments because these types of things pop into my head every time on HN (better get ahead of it because people will pick apart my quick comment if I don't cover as many bases as possible in the original comment!). Your method is better! I have to learn how to be more "focused" and let folks just do their thing and then reply succinctly like you did here.
The Paris Agreement deals with total emissions. Unlike previous climate treaties, it doesn't specify a baseline year. If you use 2005, as the US was supposed to use, the 2030 target is ~3.5 billion tonnes. 2024 emissions were ~4.9 billion tonnes. If you use a 1990 baseline, as in earlier treaties, the US target becomes ~2.9 billion tonnes.
US population has been basically stable (+10% over the past 10 years), so per capita (in terms of the paris agreement timeframe) is a reasonable proxy.
Good point. But one factor is China is also greatly reducing their emissions. For instance, their pollution levels have plummeted after enacting strict controls:
Are they? because looking at these charts[0], although fossil fuel use as a percent of total energy may be going down, the absolute values for coal, gas and oil only go up year over year.
Sure. Difficult to say much from so few datapoints alone.
On the other hand, the apparent cause suggests the trend will continue.
On the other other hand, perhaps China will suddenly decide to build 100 GW of data centers meaning they ramp all the existing coal plants up to 100% load.
It's still a big change from the previous status quo. I've been checking on absolute emissions on various industrial countries for a while now and this is the first time I've seen them actually flat (and not decreasing as a fraction but increasing in absolute terms)
Ah, right. Yeah, I've been reading about their incredible decrease in pollution overall, and not on just their C02 emissions. Didn't know these had still been rising over the years, and it's really only in the two years have these been falling too. Still, amazing turn around.
> US consumers and businesses buy almost all their stuff from China
This is not really the case, China is the US' #3 trading partner, and trade-corrected GHGs are also down (see the graph further down the page), actually by an slightly better percentage off-peak.
China’s massive coal footprint is shrinking due to successful, intentional effort under the most recent five year plan, and coal’s presence in China’s power mix will likely continue to shrink, while China ramps up exports of clean energy technology to the rest of the world.
In absolute terms, china's coal footprint is increasing, and will continue to increase in the short term, as of early 2026, they were still opening new coal plants.
China is shifting it's coal use from direct burning in coal power plants to coal based oil, gas and chemicals, reducing the need for energy imports that could be cut off in a conflict. Carbon, in form of CO2, will still be released to the atmosphere from this products.
Not just the US, a lot of developed countries have outsourced the problem to China (or other countries) to look good on paper, and tanked their local manufacturing as a by-product. It will be interesting how history records this moment.
Batteries taking over gas peakers is the next milestone I’m looking forward to. We will need gas generation for base load for quite a while due to the pure infrastructure that exists.
I do fear that natural gas may end up as a Nuclear scenario where in we do not wholly embrace natural gas Fuel Cells that produce electricity with no emissions. Yes you have the fracking issue but the US owns that environmental damage within its borders instead of outsourcing mineral extraction to poorer countries. We solve the biggest issue with fossil fuels (emissions) while working on limiting environmental impacts on extraction. It’s also way less noisy than gas turbines and can be scaled to basically any size.
Bloom is the gold standard right now but I hope they get strong competition soon, I truly believe/hope that Natural Gas fuel cells are a massive piece to the future energy puzzle.
Not sure that will come to pass. With the drop in price of both solar and batteries being not only continuous but accelerating, we're quickly approaching a tipping point where it will become uneconomical to not replace anything grid-tied fossil-fuel with solar/wind+battery.
To be clear, fuel cells are considered "low air pollution" because they eliminate certain nasty combustion products (NOx), but they still produce as much CO2 per kWh as a gas turbine.
Arguably that CO2 stream is concentrated and a candidate for capture/sequestration, but no one is doing that in practice.
I work in clean energy, and whenever I read comments like those in this thread I realize there’s so much that I take for granted that is still relatively unknown outside my bubble.
It's somehow still early innings for the energy transition, and there are a lot of fun engineering problems to work on. Join us, start here: climatebase.org
I told someone about UBI and they hadn’t heard of it, 4 or 5 years ago, despite being an executive at a charity that is supposed to help people with food money.
No, the clean energy industry is doing that, it’s a large and growing industry with billions of capital deployed and millions of people working hard across technology and policy to make it happen.
There was an article recently about how the West Asia war is quickly decarbonising South Asia. Lot of solar and wind projects in the pipeline for SA countries. Especially because now renewables are a national security issue
The entire continent doesn't even make sense. Geographically, sure, culturally, absolutely not. It should either be Eurasia or probably about 5 different continents (South of Himalaya aka Indian subcontinent, North of Himalaya aka Siberia + Central Asia + China + South East Asia, South of Caucasus + Kopet Dag aka Middle East, etc).
The entire region needs a better name. It's own name, something that's not meant to be "in the middle, between more important regions", "west of what people consider more important".
I was actually thinking about that and stuff like "Fertile Crescent" would be more neutral (but it risks not covering places like Arabia).
I wonder if locals have a generic name for the entire region that's more appropriate.
Meanwhile solar and storage are continually plummeting in price.
So the current trend of approximately all new generation being renewables is going to accelerate. And then it will start eating into older, existing generation assets, causing early retirements of existing gas generation capacity.
Most investors think that any new gas generation built today will be a stranded asset long before its end of life. That doesn't matter to the hyperscalers, who run them so poorly and hard that the turbine shafts die in a few years and can afford it, but for regular utilities, buying any new gas generation is a boondoggle meant to soak the ratepayers and capture the guaranteed profit rate.
And the numbers above ignore residential solar, which will further lessen demand for gas, and as the cost of transmission and distribution soar on the grid, residential solar becomes an always better deal, because it skips all that.
The global cost-minimum for a future grid will have gas on it for maybe 20 more years, but not much after that. We'll switch to lots of storage and tons of over-capacity of solar and wind.
It will be interesting to see how solar evolves in the coming decade in US, maybe it could reach the current share of gas produced electricity, 40% . The country with the highest share of solar electricity is Hungary 27%, but they are part of the European electricity grid with lot of export and import.
Gas turbine manufacturing factories are very expensive and gas turbine manufacturers have already experienced turbine market crashed in 2018. Nobody wants to sit on loans for expensive idle factories in 5 years when the AI hype stops.
Per MWh costs of residential solar are usually 2x per MWh costs of utility scale solar. Utility scale solar power plants buy and install solar panels at larger scale and cheaper.
Most places can't run on residential solar + battery 365 days in year and need grid connectivity. As more homes install residential solar + battery the grid costs, which are independent of the number of hours when the grid is used, will stay the same. The amount of consumed gas will be lower. The costs of building gas power plants will stay the same (they are the backup), the costs of maintaining gas power plants will increase (more frequent ramping up and down).
"Ramping damage in gas turbines refers to the wear and tear or stress that occurs as a result of frequent changes in the operating load, also known as load cycling. Gas turbines are designed to operate efficiently at steady-state conditions, and deviations from these conditions can lead to various issues"
> Per MWh costs of residential solar are usually 2x per MWh costs of utility scale solar. Utility scale solar power plants buy and install solar panels at larger scale and cheaper.
The only problem with this comparison is the cost of the grid, which at least in the US will dwarf the savings from doing utility scale installs.
One nice thing about residential solar is that it greatly reduces the need for transmission, while perhaps requiring some short-term enhancement on distribution. And ideally dumping a bunch of storage at grid distribution nodes in the form of a container of batteries would solve a ton of problems and reduce costs a lot. This is of course heavily resisted by utilities because in most places in the US they make their money on T&D costs, so cutting those is a threat to their existence.
The US has literally double its total electricity production in solar and batteries stuck in the now 5 year FIFO permit hell we require for grid additions that will cause most proposals to pull out before completion
> Solar supplied 12.8% of US electricity in May even as Trump boosts coal over clean energy
People at this point should realise that Trump is lying.
He also does the same with regards to Iran.
It is time to not only look at the Epstein connection, but also the corruption in that whole family dynasty. There has never been as much theft, I claim, as with that dynasty. (And Epstein plays a role because superrich partied with underage girls, and they told Trump to shut down all investigations. This is corruption in its final stage. Same here - Trump babbles about old energy but his superrich friends expand on renewables. And profit. As always.)
This is more from a lot of coal power plants being converted to gas over the past 20 years than solar overtaking the outputs of those power plants. Coal output shrinking, solar output rising, the lines have crossed.
Coal is unpopular in all but a few areas where coal mining is still a part of the local econonmy. I used to work near a coal plant and every day I'd go out to my car and it would have little black particles all over it. Nobody likes that, no matter what the President says.
Total electricity produced by coal + gas is down over the last 20 years. Total electricity production is up, the difference is from wind and solar.
This administration swapped to actively suppressing Wind and Solar via tariffs etc, and yet the trends continued because the underlying economic reality heavily favors battery backed solar.
I think that's part of what's notable about this. The administration hasn't been able to reverse the trend despite putting a massive thumb on the scale against projects like offshore wind and tariffs on solar panel imports.
There's probably a delay in the effects though since projects started before they took office are probably starting to thin out and finish up. We'd have to look into the permitting of new projects or wait for to see how big the decline in new capacity turns out to be in a couple years.
A lot of comes from state initiatives too. Texas being conservative also happens to be very pro solar. I’m in the business and we have some great projects there. The US military is also pushing solar at their facilities. Then you have many private-state partnerships like tolls investing a lot in solar. The outlook in general is pretty positive in the US, a lot more than what people would think.
Anyone who still even views this as a conservative/liberal issue, is someone who is in the pocket of the fossil fuel lobby. Solar is simply a very cheap and realiable way to generate electricity. Much cheaper than gas and coal nowadays. Pure economic incentive is going to continue to drive its adoption.
As someone from another continent, I giggle when I see doomsday-prepping anti-govmint fiercely-independent cowboys hating EVs and loving gas.
Gas has a 6-month shelf-life, and is attached to a whole geopolitically volatile military-industrial complex. Meanwhile an EV + solar can be actually self-sufficient and last for a decade or two. A realistic Mad Max would have been EV battles over solar panels.
this’ the other Max from China, where they be scavenging leftover panels. The Mad Max we know surely happens somewhere else, and perhaps near Texas given all the participating parties…
I also recall a New York times article from many moons ago suggesting that a lot of Texas oil wealth got repurposed into a large-scale wind energy infrastructure, but my info might be out of date.
True though one of the major things they have been able to do because it's mostly in the federal purview is killing offshore wind.
This is hilarious to me. In my country people prefer to have wind turbines 20 kilometres off the coast line instead of near their house...
Offshore wind is the perfect NIMBY solution.
It's sort a "broken clock right twice a day" thing, but I agree with not doing offshore wind in the US. The divergence immediately follows in that I wish they would just push onshore wind.
It's sort of a circular issue, it's madly expensive because we haven't built a lot and aren't super good at it, and we don't get much of it built because we aren't great at it and it always is ludicrously expensive.
The US has a uniquely underdeveloped maritime sector, we don't build a lot of the massive turbines you use offshore. You drive through central and west texas, it feels like there might be more wind turbines than people. We've kind of already made the decision based on what works.
Ocean winds are strong and predictable in ways that are really beneficial to the wind farms so the extra costs are balanced out by the fact that there's always a strong usable wind to harness too.
Also the "we're bad at this because we don't do the so we can't do this" is throwing away a great project and solution because of a temporary problem. Once we start doing it in significant numbers we'll rapidly get better at doing it too.
I think the idea of offshore wind is nice. There is a lot of ocean out there and by putting the "ugly" (I don't mind them.) turbines out of sight we get the best of both worlds.
But the realities of the idea - the engineering - is problematic.
The ocean is a harsh environment and maintaining something deliberately put out of the way in a harsher environment is far more expensive.
There are a lot of ocean, but limited shores. I guess that's the only economical place to build it, but of course it blocks scenery. If people truly built it in open ocean, less people will complain.
Tariffs on solar panel imports should stimulate domestic solar panel production, but only when they are high enough and applied long enough to justify investments into new solar panel manufacturing facilities.
You can do it with targeted tariffs with assurances they'll last but these broad tariffs make it harder to get the base materials you need to build the panels out of in the first place plus they're so crazy they're almost guaranteed to be wiped out in a few years if not sooner so as a manufacturer they don't have the confidence that the cost equalization of the tariffs will be around long enough to not bankrupt them.
Another way to do it would be guaranteed buys for electrifying military etc and grants for projects using US made cells instead of foreign ones that could also effectively subsidize local production.
It's like a lot of things done by this administration they do it such hamfisted and obvious ways that they don't accomplish their nominal goals. See a lot of the court cases where they've been blocked in implementation because they said the quiet part out loud. eg: it's usually REALLY hard to prove malicious prosecution but they keep saying out loud "we're prosecuting this person in retaliation for their protected activities".
Like you can't avoid gravity, you can't avoid economic reality. Not in the long term anyway.
It's especially notable because there isn't just the thumb against offshore wind, solar panel tariffs, and even EVs. Chinese EVs can't be imported because of tariffs and many conservative states a pretending that EV drivers "don't pay their fair share because they don't buy gas" - except most gas taxes haven't been adjusted in multiple decades and don't even begin to pay for the cost of maintaining roads. Fuel taxes are a tiny portion of any state revenue.
There has always been a massive thumb on the scale in the form of tax breaks, direct subsidies (billions a year alone on this), land leasing, etc for fossil fuels and their use. Favorable public policy. And what the IMF calls implicit subsidies - the cost of impact on the climate/environment and people's health.
When a refinery is pumping out pollution and everyone in the area is getting sicker than people in similar areas - that costs us as insurance ratepayers and taxpayers.
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/5-hidden-ways-the-g...
https://www.imf.org/en/topics/climate-change/energy-subsidie...
...to name a few. A simple google search will turn up dozens more.
And yet what is the first critique of solar and wind by right wingers? "It's only cheaper because of all my tax dollars going to subsidizing them."
Federal, state, and local subsidies for green energy and EVs are a drop in the bucket.
Unfortunately this is one of the few cases where both sides are close to the same -- they both chose to heavily tariff foreign EVs. Something to remember when Democrats talk about climate change.
"closer to the same" except one side has consistently promoted the building and sale of EVs in America.
If you were feeling generous you could credit then with the entire existence of modern EVs given their support of the nascent industry for decades in California.
But sure, let's focus on the mote in Democrat eyes and ignore the insanity across the aisle. That's what got us into this situation, so why stop now.
It's the same in the UK. The CfD "subsidy" mechanism for solar power results in the solar farms paying us money almost every day - including today - but you will still see right wing politicians vow to eliminate this "subsidy".
The numbers for 2014-2024: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/table.php?t=epa_03_01...
I doubted what you wrote, but everything you said is correct (for the last 10 years, at least). Over the time period, natural gas increased 740 TWh/year (to 1870) and coal decreased 940 TWh/year (to 650). Electricity production is up ~7%, but that's quite low compared to the growth of everything else.
> This administration swapped to actively suppressing Wind and Solar via tariffs etc
Biden's administration put on solar tariffs, but of course I'll grant the current administration is fucking up everything else possible.
Plenty of blame to go around, my understanding of the timeline is:
Trumps first administration put in solar Tariffs with China (25%), Biden administration increased them with China (50%), 2nd Trump administration increased those and applied solar Tariffs to other countries. Though honestly I’ve largely stopped paying attention at this point.
Solar adoption increased through all of that.
I think the issue is that the tarriffs just don’t really matter anymore because the panels are so cheap that they’re dwarfed by the “balance of system” costs — installation, racking, inverters, cabling, etc.
As a foreigner it just seems.so braindead that the administrations would tarrif solar panels. The US doesnt have a great manufacturing capacity for solar panels compared to established manufacturers. The high cost of new production ensures slow uptake.
From a place that embraced solar rebates, and has subsequently benefited from having in place solar battery rebates, we have a thriving industry of solar installers, electricians, and an ever increasing amount of local grid energy security in the event that storms or accidents cause supply disruptions. About 5% of households will likely not see an energy bill for the next 20 years. Another 40% have solar that covers daytime energy requirements.
The requirement for baseline coal.and gas has been decreasing - though will not completely abate.
I live in a state that produces abundant coal for power and steel. We have decreased our carbon emissions to 35% below 2005 levels.
A new coal-fired power plant hasn't come online in the US since 2013, IIRC.
Biden also put out a bunch of incentives in the IRA to encourage domestic solar panel production.
The invisible hand of the market will always win
It’s also from focused efforts to close coal plants, and rapid, massive deployment of solar in the last 20 years, and new technology emerging (better batteries and dispatch technologies) to make solar into a 24/7 resource.
For whatever reason, there’s a strong motivation for people to dismiss the gigantic global effort to transition the energy system away from fossil fuels, and claim that all that effort isn’t really doing anything. Thankfully, this is not true — determined people can change things for the better.
> It’s also from focused efforts to close coal plants,
For many years coal has been more expensive than solar and wind. That's why utilities are decommissioning the plants.
It’s true, and the strategy of climate activists in the early 2000s and 2010s was to do everything they could to make coal and other fossil fuels as expensive as possible: by reducing access to capital, increasing the cost of legal and regulatory hurdles, sometime delaying projects through physical blockades, etc etc.
It would be nice if we could get industries to pay for the pollution they cause, but I'll take what I can get.
Which was the best possible strategy they could have taken.
Some utilities didn't have direct market pressures to close coal because they were regulated and the regulator allowed them to recover costs plus a profit on top.
> For whatever reason, there’s a strong motivation for people to dismiss the gigantic global effort to transition the energy system away from fossil fuels, and claim that all that effort isn’t really doing anything.
Because renewable energy is Communism, or something.
But seriously: $$$$. The Fossil Fuel industry, before it finally dies, will make big Tobacco look downright merciful. The owners of these companies and their media co-conspirators should be tried in the Hague for what they have done to our planet just to keep making fucking money.
> The Fossil Fuel industry, before it finally dies, will make big Tobacco look downright merciful.
This should not be surprising when one realizes that this industry is the biggest industry that humanity ever created (in terms of monetary value). Nothing ever is or was bigger than energy from fossil fuels. Predictably, those who profit from this, behave like selfish [...] and fight tooth and nail to keep their profits.
Energy is 10% of global GDP, about $10 T a year.
I remember this when anyone complains large scale use of solar and wind would be expensive. So is large scale use of any energy source.
Putting the planet aside for a moment, the unnecessary death and illness they've inflicted on the human race will be staggering.
I would disagree, I think that plentiful affordable energy has been a huge benefit to the human race. Transportation, refrigeration, manufacturing, simply having electricity in the home, most everything we take for granted in terms of our current standard of living traces back to abundant and cheap energy.
But there is no reason to hang on to the old, dirty technology if there are now better alternatives. And if the economics work, the market will follow, as it seems to be doing. You can't fake lower costs.
Nuclear should have replaced coal decades ago but the economics didn't actually work, even though the environmental benefit would have been real.
Oh for fucking sure. I consider humans as much a part of the planet as anything else, but also very valid to call it out specifically.
Mass death of species too numerous to name, the biosphere itself, property damage from rising ocean levels, the soon to fail air currents, all the damage and death from extreme weather events, all of it. All of it could've been fucking prevented and it wasn't, because profits.
I wish I believed in hell for people like this.
No, this is actually solar's output increasing.
Natural gas's share of electricity generation has been falling for five years straight:
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/gas-share-in-global...
That's a link to a global chart. The OP is talking about the US. It's not surprising that countries that have to import natural gas are moving away from it and countries with plentiful local suppliew are doubling down on it.
I'm not seeing that in US data either. Here's data from a top web hit:
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...
The 10-year change 2015 to 2025 is:
- Gas: +472 TWh, +35%
- Renewables: +525 TWh, +97%
Saying that this is more gas than coal is certainly not the case borne out by the numbers, even in the US, the one place where gas is as cheap as dirt due to it being a by-product of fracking.
> have little black particles all over it. Nobody likes that, no matter what the President says.
Should you live near one of those big noisy "freeway" things you may note the little black particles over everything in the surroundings but nobody likes to tear down the interstate.
I have two things to say to that.
First, I live 150 yards from a major freeway - I-90 in WA, it's three lanes in each direction here. There are no tiny black particles over everything in surroundings, and my outdoors AQI (from my own sensor) is normally in single digits and basically only ever gets above 50 if it's wildfire smoke or the neighbors are burning something.
But second, if we developed a reliable and cheap way to, say, teleport people over long distances, why not tear it down?
Note the use of 'may'; the details of the car-hell vary. Perhaps the I-90 pollution instead spills into the lake and then bioaccumultes into larger organisms, Bon Appétit! My anecdote was a bit southwesterly of the I-5 bridge where there was, besides the horrific noise pollution, definitely a greyish black soot to clean off everything. A fine result of rolling a natural one and automatically failing the skill check for "copy the autobahn", probably.
As to why some beings need to be whisked hither and yon with such haste, and thus spend quite a bit of time (and energy) trying to be somewhere, anywhere else, well, are they hungry ghosts? Or maybe they min/maxed for wizard and ended up with only three points in wisdom?
How are you measuring your AQI, and what particle size? Tire particles aren't PM2.5 AFAIK and are very hazardous to your health.
I think the freeways are going from larger particles to smaller ones as DEF gets rid of the bigger diesel particles.
smaller stuff is more dangerous and goes deeper into your body:
- PM10: inhalable dust entering the nose and mouth.
- PM4: respirable fraction that can reach the gas-exchange region.
- PM2.5: fine particles that penetrate deep into the lungs.
- PM1: ultrafine particles with potential to translocate beyond the lungs.
> nobody likes to tear down the interstate
Lots of urban areas in the US have been resisting, tearing down, and/or relocating major roads since the freeway revolts of the 1970s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_revolts_in_the_United_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeway_removal
Some of these plants are being retrofitted for dual firing. They can burn coal & natural gas at the same time. I wonder how that factors into these statistics.
The world is, roughly, deploying 1TW/solar PV a year at current rates. It took a while to get here, it won’t take as long to get to 100%.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...
Storage is the issue. You still need to supply base load (well, all load) at night.
LFPs are cheap and safe, with very good cycle counts.
Sodium seems to be actually hitting real commercial production volumes (ex - GM just announced a sodium ramp up days ago, CATL has been producing them for a while). I expect we'll see sodium mature a good bit over the next decade (right now - it's just not quite as good as LFP, but it has a lot of promise in temperature extremes and cheap input materials)
So sure - storage is an issue. But it's not THE issue anymore. It costs surprisingly little to get enough LFP storage to cover an entire house at modest usage for days at a time (ex - under 10k for 42.9KWh of storage, UL approved https://signaturesolar.com/eg4-wallmount-all-weather-lithium...)
So yes - storage remains something to consider. But I think pretending that storage is a constraint that should stop PV rollout is... cough... bullshit cough...
Let industry that needs it pull from existing generation at night, convert residential to solar as fast as possible. Subsidize residential battery rollout the same way we do for insulation and other efficiency improving home improvements (which to be clear - we were doing prior to the current admin).
China isn't fucking around on the solar front, and the continued excuses in US from entrenched interests tangled up in the oil industry are criminal.
I suspect sodium is better than lithium today. The win is that sodium is much more forgiving of high temperatures so they can be run without cooling fans/pumps. Lithium battery installations are actually loud owing to all of their cooling infrastructure.
No cooling means the sodium batteries are easier/cheaper to maintain (no mechanical failures). Maybe not as energy dense, but you could still come out ahead long term when accounting for Capex+Opex.
Seems likely. But I can't buy sodium ion today like I can LFP.
The chemistry definitely seems to be better than LFP long term, but higher manufacturing costs and low scale means it's just not as available.
CATL is predicting that they'll hit price parity for sodium against LFP this year, commercial scaling still needs to happen, though.
Meanwhile, manufacturers can pick up prismatic LFP from all sorts of places, at great prices (ex - https://www.18650batterystore.com/collections/lifepo4-prisma...)
You can by sodium ion batteries today. They're more expensive, but work better in the cold.
https://www.bluettipower.com/products/sodium-ion-battery-pio...
You can't really get them in the sort of energy density you need for an ESS at any comparable price to LFP right now, so they only really make sense in really limited spots.
Ex - the closest I can find is something like: https://batteryfinds.com/product/3-1v-210ah-sodium-ionna-ion...
but just compare against LFP: https://www.18650batterystore.com/products/eve-mb31-grade-a-...
So...
LFP: 4.0KWh @ $275.00 Sodium: 2.6KWh @ $568.00
Right now, it's older generations of the chemistry, and you end up paying twice as much for half the power. So yeah... unless you really need the temperature extremes, it makes a lot more sense to stick with LFP.
But CATL at least is claiming they have cells in the pipeline for this year that get NA+ down to comparable $/KWh as LFP, and then yes - I'd much prefer to use the newer chemistry.
If sodium follows the same trend as LFP did, they'll get much cheaper at scale, and performance will go up markedly over the next 15 years. I won't be at all surprised to see them end up completely dominating the space in the long run, but we're not yet at the spot where they're better than LFP (at its most mature).
Peak Energy already has 3MWh units deployed (first deployment in July 2025) and more sales on the books. Yes, they are laughably low volume vs the established lithium BESS, but it is happening and you can at least get in the queue. They are hoping to open a US plant in 2027.
[0] https://peakenergy.com/
I think it's your last point that's actually the strongest.
There's always gaps between theoretical and practical, but to see China investing so hard in the future while the US digs in it's heels is infuriating.
>...while the US digs in it's heels is infuriating.
And we shouldn't imply that this policy represents any sort of national consensus -- it's pure corruption plain and simple.
It's also sabotage of all domestic manufacturing.
The price of energy sets a floor on the price of all manufactured goods. By kneecapping the cheapest sources of energy, the regime kneecaps all domestic manufacturers.
China's aggressive buildout of cost effective energy production isn't because they're 'woke,' it's because it makes them more competitive. Every product they export at low prices is in part due to the their extremely cheap energy.
It's like the regime looked at the UK's collapsing manufacturing industry due to their high energy costs and said "I want that for us!"
Its also just strategically sensible. China is well aware it has very long supply lines for oil, and the less of it they need the better.
Corruption that concentrates on one party whether that party is in or out of power, too.
China exported 68GW of solar PV in March 2026, double the prior month and 14GW more than total solar PV capacity installed in Spain.
Chinese solar exports double in a month to hit record high amid energy crisis - https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/chinese-solar-export... - April 23rd, 2026
https://ember-energy.org/data/chinas-solar-pv-export-explore...
https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-e...
I read some interesting things about crazy sounding technologies like vanadium flow and iron batteries. I think we're at most 10 years away from storage being not fully solved, but becoming an enabler more than a bottleneck.
What data make you think storage isn't fully solved now?
Vanadium flow batteries are more expensive and less durable then LFP and the price won't come down because Vanadium is an expensive metal to get.
They were interesting but the whole concept just has problems and has for over a decade at this point despite commercialisation efforts.
Same story with iron: it's out there, but the scale on LFP and likely Sodium is going to shoot right past it.
No, storage (and transmission) are, in fact, THE issue. They always were. Solar is cheap and easy to install. Balancing a net zero grid without storage and with the pitiful transmission we have now is simply not possible. See: california.
The entire CAISO is a power laundering scheme to allow california to have publicly have huge amounts of solar power that overproduces enormously (including strongly negative power prices for a good chink of day) and still import dirty base load power quietly.
If storage was simple to solve, it would be solved. Chemical storage simply doesn't exist at the required scale and we don't like to build the one thing that we could, right this second - pumped storage.
We are already massively overbuilding solar. We would be well serv d to stop building panels and start building pump storage and transmission lines to distribute the stuff we've already got, but nobody makes a political career announcing a new transmission line.
California? The state that hasn't had a blackout since 2020, the state with the lowest wholesale electricity cost, by far?
https://cleantechnica.com/2026/05/30/california-lowest-whole...
It is solved. Citations below.
When the sun sets, batteries rise: 24/7 solar in California - https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2026/02/17/when-the-sun-sets-bat... - February 17th, 2026
Natural gas use for electricity in California falls as solar generation rises - https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=66704 - November 24th, 2025
California's solar and battery combo packs a transformational punch - https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/californias-sola... - October 3rd, 2025
California solar curtailment down 12% on back of batteries - https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2025/07/22/california-solar-curt... - July 22nd, 2025 ("For the first five months of 2025, CAISO data showed solar electricity curtailment declined by 12% as a share of generation, falling from 13% to 11.5%, even as solar output grew 18% year over year. During this period, however, curtailment still rose 4.1% in absolute terms, with March showing a 28% increase, matching the prior year’s peak.")
Batteries Taking Charge of the California Grid - https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-batteries-apr-2024/ - May 6th, 2024
Batteries are scaling up faster than ever in the US, enabling record solar growth to continue and reducing fossil fuel use. - https://ember-energy.org/chapter/the-rise-of-batteries-plus-...
> In 2024, California and Nevada led the nation in solar power, becoming the first states to surpass 30% annual solar share, with California hitting 32% and Nevada 31% – the highest shares of any state. But the transition is uneven – while some states are surging ahead, others are just beginning to see significant growth.
> Batteries are essential for the rise of solar, allowing solar to meet growing demand and displacing gas and coal generation. Across the US, the growth of batteries is accelerating alongside solar, with 1 MW of storage being added for every 3 MW of solar added in 2024.
California Energy Storage System Survey - https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
Contrary to popular belief, solar panels don't generate zero power on cloudy days.
They typically generate 10-25% of their maximum output on the cloudiest of days. Most cloudy days are not maximally cloudy.
We don't need solar panels everywhere to get even close to ~100% renewables (with nuclear, wind, new geothermal, and hydro). The areas where you put them are distributed enough that it would be exceptionally rare to ever encounter a meaningful need to ration.
So, storage is an issue, but not as big of an issue as most people think, and we do not generate anywhere near enough solar energy for it to be a reasonable concern yet...
There's also more solutions than just conventional batteries. There's pumped hydro, etc...
> They typically generate 10-25% of their maximum output on the cloudiest of days. Most cloudy days are not maximally cloudy.
If you're at higher latitudes, this is notably less of a drop-off than you see between high/low season.
My friends with residential solar see <10% overall output in January vs July. (~60% drop from fewer sunshine hours, ~80% drop from decreased solar irradiance.)
This gets complex quickly, because temperature matters too: cells are more efficient when they are cold. These effects interact and the results are sometimes surprising.
Many pure-numbers theoretical comparisons also make the assumption that you can consume all the power that the cells generate, which is not always the case. In an off-grid installation with a battery, for example, you might not be able to consume everything, depending on the month of the year. Practical example: my installation gets some of peak usage numbers in March/April, because that's when it's still cold and I use the power for heating. The cells are cold, I need the power, and there is some sunshine, all this combines. It's not obvious.
Yeah, I mean these aren't entirely theoretical, like observationally, people I know locally are getting <10% January vs July generation - I'm working backwards to get the relative proportion of the drops due to solar hours vs irradiance.
They all have a relatively generous (I think - I'm not especially familiar with policies anywhere else) grid policy where they sell back any over-production in the summer. (They switch between summer/winter rates, so in the summer they buy/sell at ~35c/kWh and in the winter they buy/sell at ~8c/kWh. These rates are only effective as long as you don't have a net-surplus of generation in the year, so it doesn't make sense economically to oversize the system for more winter generation, as then you'll be generating more in the summer than you can use or sell back.)
Curtailment and dump loads are pretty straightforward, though, so using all the power isn't as critical as people might imagine either.
It's better to overbuild the dc-to-ac ratio moderately and just accept that on a summer noon you'll be dumping or curtailing, and still get useful percentages in the winter. I'm in the fortunate position of having an essentially infinite dump load (water pumping and heating) that would effectively turn most of my solar into real usage, but even most people can preheat a hot water tank and things like that. With electric cars it's even better.
One of Standard Thermal's use cases is excess DC power from existing solar farms that would otherwise be curtailed because of inverter/interconnect limits.
There's also the angle of the sun to consider, it changes quite a bit in higher latitudes between summer and winter so if you want maximum efficiency you need to tilt the cells accordingly. But I don't think most residential solar does that.
But they do generate zero power at night.
And people use less energy at night. Yes, they do need heating/cooling and a few other things at night, but the peak is during the day and in the evening.
This argument is almost closed at this point, with PV + batteries being quite price competitive. We're no longer in 2018.
Solution? Send large mirrors into space so it never stops shining.
https://www.reflectorbital.com/
That surely won't interfere with the ecosystem at all! /s
The main load is during the day when the sun shines anyway, and then the seasonally changing periods before and after, basically ramping when people are getting up, then dropping off while people are going to bed. On the west side of a continent, the power for the ramp can come from the east because the sun shines earlier there; on the west the sun shines later and the east can get power. At night, there are still nuclear and other plants, and it is very foreseeable that installations of ground battery technology will have been in place well before twentieth century plants are retired.
High load in the day during sunlight is mostly true for summer heat, but in the winter you have cold evenings which requires base load or storage, combined with solar angle/efficiency being worse in the winter.
> in the winter you have cold evenings which requires base load or storage
If the energy is for heating then there is always the option of storing the energy as heat. Which is much simpler than storing electricity.
Actually, the US uses more power during the day in the summer - there is a dropoff in the night for both summer and winter. Night time use is somewhat similar. [1]
Cooling takes more energy than warming, so the summer daytime use is higher. Summer = warm evenings. I'm from Indiana - it was almost always cooler at 10am than 7pm, even in the winter. It takes time to heat up or cool down. I'll also mention that nights and weekends use less power because business and industry tend to shut down during these times.
Which would somewhat logically mean that despite the efficiency being worse during winter, it isn't as much of a strain because power demands are less.
[1]https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915
Cooling doesn't really take more energy than warming, because cooling is warming if you have a heat pump. Are you not just observing here the usage of fossil fuels for heating, which is extremely common?
How common are heat pumps in the states now - and is this something your average worker can afford? I looked into it some time before I moved - and before they were as popular - and installation costs were prohibitive. Moved to Norway over a decade ago. Heat pumps are popular but most homes don't have them here, especially in the cities. I can't imagine that rentals are upgrading, considering its rare to even update insulation in the cheapest rentals.
Are heat pumps common for factories and offices, which account for a lot of energy usage during the week?
Anywhere they aren't common, cooling generally is going to require more traditional methods and the energy cost is greater than just heating. If it were the other way around, poor folks would use a window air conditioner to heat. Cooling pretty much always creates warming - which is the reason it is vented outside.
The energy use I linked to doesn't actually consider where the energy comes from - just the use itself. These methods aren't going to use more or less energy depending on where the energy comes from. Heat pumps would make less usage due to efficiency.
Heat pumps are in most new construction in major cities now - Seattle's required them for years, other cities do too. They aren't significantly more expensive than any other method now, especially with a lot of local utility rebates.
Yeah, it's imperfect.
Does that mean that it is untenable?
Not quite, current nighttime load is largely a function of cheaper nighttime rates. People don’t set their EV’s to charge from 11-5AM because that’s the only time their cars are plugged in. If rates crater at noon on Sunday, there’s many an EV happy to suck up power then.
So yes batteries are going to continue to grow rapidly, but it’s a smaller role than it might seem.
Great, so now not only is power production nondeterministic, your cars tank also is. It was too expensive and the algorithm decided to wait charging, so no spontaneous road trip for you, sorry.
As an electric car owner, this is absolutely the biggest non-problem ever. If you're planning a long journey, you push one button at some point over the preceeding week and it charges to full regardless of price.
There’s nothing non deterministic about cheaper daytime rates as you scale solar production. Net result, lower average electricity prices but a slow rise in nighttime rates across decades.
Similarly people respond to price changes, that’s the foundation for how capitalism functions. You don’t need to care, but many people will choose to save money when possible.
I mean, assuming you don't zero your charge out when returning home, you could just take a few minutes to use a rapid charger part way through the journey...
The whole point about modern gas/coal plants is that it's relatively cheap to shut them down and start them up again. They are backup power, not for providing inflexible base load. Batteries + renewables are taking a lot of market share and flexible backup power is much more important than baseload (inflexible power like nuclear)
Gas is faster to respond, coal, not so much.
From the Goog:
Starting up a coal-fired power station depends heavily on the plant's current temperature, taking anywhere from 2 to 48 hours to reach full operational capacity. Because of massive metal boilers and turbines, the heating process must be slow to prevent severe thermal fatigue and equipment damage. [1, 2] The startup time is broken down by the plant's previous state:
To explore how these heavy thermal operations impact the broader electricity supply, you can review the U.S. Energy Information Administration's grid reliability data or dive deeper into the technical challenges via the Environmental Protection Agency's Coal Startup Report. [6] If you are interested in the broader power market, let me know:[1] https://www.quora.com/Why-its-not-that-easy-to-start-operati...
[2] https://www.quora.com/How-long-does-it-take-for-a-thermal-po...
[3] https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2015-11/documents/ma...
[4] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-minimum-time-required-by-s...
[5] https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/inflexible-fossil-fuels/
[6] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=45956
We can keep some of that coal-fired stuff around and use it periodically.
It's OK. Winter happens every year.
When the market needs that power, then the market will have to pay for it.
It turns out battery prices have dropped so much that this isn't difficult anymore either.
These days I think "at night" is mostly covered or at least could be mostly covered both by wind and batteries.
The "base load" question may still be appropriate for deep winter, high (or low) latitudes, etc, but renewables are getting there pretty fast.
The fossil fuel lobbies want us to believe it is a way bigger problem than it is.
The people who echo that sentiment without educating themselves are giving them a helping hand.
Grid batteries are being deployed everywhere every day and the cost including storage is now lower than fossil fuels.
True, but battery advancements are ongoing at a rapid pace. Sodium-ion is now viable and will be a mainstay in grid storage. Ignoring ideology, this path is plain cheaper than anything else.
It's not, grid-scale batteries are being deployed all over the world, and newer batteries keep getting better and cheaper. Storage hasn't been the issue for years.
To be fair, it depends if you were looking at "price/unit" or "sum of factory output".
The former, even a few years ago, I agree. The latter, people were arguing about a year or two ago. (Though your point remains as the trend was clear).
Solar has also overtaken fossil gas.
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/renewables...
The growth of solar is astounding. I dug into data a while back and tried to do some visualizations of it, mainly for my own understanding:
https://torkeldanielsson.se/solar-energy-forecasts/
Solar is already by far our cheapest source of energy. As solar expands, the learning rate means solar will be even cheaper. We should expect solar to be the single largest source of energy on earth by 2035.
A shame electricity is not the whole picture when it comes to energy. The resurgence in EV sales off the back of high gas prices is awesome, but almost 100% of bulk transport costs still rely on oil. Also, unlike EV's which can be plugged in at home for most of their needs, bulk-transport will require considerable new infrastructure to make the transition. Still a way to go.
Something like half of all bulk transport is moving fossil fuels around. So there’s already a huge win
There was a global agreement to shift ocean transport from oil.
The US killed it.
The US and Israel attacked Iran causing chaos in oil markets and put it back on track.
https://www.imo.org/en/mediacentre/pressbriefings/pages/imo-...
It's a couple of months since I did the calculations, but I do believe 2035 is for all energy, not just electricity.
It's easy to drag out a flat line in an exponential graph - but the line better start bending soon or we'll end up with a truly mind boggling amount of solar energy.
There was this launched some time ago: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-02/incat-launches-worlds...
It'd an electric ship, which has what is basically a grid scale battery power plant on board to power it.
The problem is range. Good enough for it's intended use as a ferry in South America. But it's going to need to be towed there from Tasmania.
+1 to the Guardian for mentioning their data source, but -1 for not linking to it.
+2 for EMBER for having a data source AND being able to link to the parameters that show solar overtaking coal for the month in the US.
https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent...
For people who are interested in this space should very much read EMBER. They make digestable, data rich reporting.
The latest 2025 summary report[0] has some great information, some top-level call-outs
[0] https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/global-electricity-...This is a great link. The most interesting feature of the solar graph is the amplitude of the seasonal variations. It looks like we typically generating ~100% more solar power in July than December.
If "we need to store solar energy from summer to winter" is indeed a significant issue, maybe you could use the extra power in summertime to make natural gas [1] and then store the gas until you need it in the winter.
[1] https://www.terraformindustries.com/ is a startup working on turning solar power into natural gas
Other than Alaska it’s almost certainly cheaper to just over provision solar panels and curtail excess generation in the summer months as solar panels are cheaper than batteries and grid connections.
To completely decarbonise we probably will need to eventually make liquid fuels for long distance air travel. But it may make more sense to do that nearer the equator to maximise the return on the capital investment by running it constantly rather than only during the summer.
Have EMBER been vetted by the Ministry of Truth?
Question for those in the know... See lots of press about balcony solar in Germany, and California recently introduced a bill to allow it (I'm guessing other states already allow it; not sure if the CA bill has a chance of becoming law). But how far are we from a more plug and play home solar system that becomes a primary energy source as opposed to a limited secondary source? And what are the issues with it actually becoming a reality? Is it primarily regulatory where government, utilities, installers would fight it tooth and nail to protect revenue and/or the grid? Is it a legit safety issue? I have to imagine safety could be easily addressed in terms of the power management between grid and solar (obviously these balcony units are relatively safe, but tiny in comparison). Installation perhaps has more safety issues (e.g., installing panels on a roof), but I just wonder if it's reasonable to think that a more robust plug and play option will become available or is even already available in certain places.
And I feel the need to say this, but this is the type of question I'd immediately turn to an LLM to answer, and I probably will ultimately, but I "still" like getting peoples' on-the-ground experience/expertise.
i think it’s kind of the opposite: balcony solar is good for power companies in the same way that them asking you to turn off your lights is good for power companies: if each customer is using less overall power they can serve more customers with existing infra.
that obviously depends on time of use and the sun etc, but balcony solar in the USA can’t come fast enough. my electricity in NYC is almost $.40/kWh, a limited secondary source is still huge
it makes a lot of sense to me as someone who has casually researched as a way to make the load of an A/C vanish from the perspective of my utility, but i can’t see regulations catching up nationwide soon.
any real microinverters can detect the grid being down and shut off to prevent zapping people working on power lines, but the complexities of split-phase power (you can consume on one leg but backfeed on the other leg rather than consume what you generate, which is bad for billing etc) and risks of intra-circuit overload will all freak out americans.
we put outlets absolutely everywhere because of how scared we are of extension cords, there’s an education and “am i going to start an electrical file” consumer sentiment obstacle to widespread adoption in the US
Have you seen this? Free battery in NYC if you charge it with off-peak power
https://everyelectric.com/
That definitely sounds reasonable for balcony, but I was trying to ask if you were able to generate the lion's share of your usage from a DIY or plug and play system would the utilities be against that? I would think so because that would eat into their profits. If enough people were knocking several cents per kWh off their bills, would they just end up charging more for the infrastructure to make up for the loss? I'm sure there's some happy medium where they'd be happy, as you say, but at some number I'm guessing they'd fight back against too much adoption.
> my electricity in NYC is almost $.40/kWh, a limited secondary source is still huge
This alone would be incredible from wider adoption of balcony (incredible for the consumer I mean). If you knock a few cents per kWh off, which I think you can do with daytime/early evening usage (when the panels are still producing some energy so no storage required) that would be fantastic. Baby steps to a full system that you can DIY without anyone objecting.
> If enough people were knocking several cents per kWh off their bills, would they just end up charging more for the infrastructure to make up for the loss?
Traditional residential electric utility billing puts a lot of emphasis on usage, but when there's a lot more residential solar, that ends up not reflecting the costs very well. I think, over time, you'll see things where you pay a distribution fee per kWh in either direction, and then also pay for energy input and get paid for energy output. You might also see a demand charge that scales with your connection size or your maximum load/generation. If you don't have local generation with export, everything kind of mushes into the usage charge, especially if it's tiered... but when you exporting with net metering, you pay the same bill for exporting 950kWh and importing 1000kWh as someone who imports 100kWh and exports 50kWh, but one customer is using the grid a lot more than the other.
You see something like that with California's NEM 3.0 tarrif setting export price to the 'avoided cost' instead of offsetting import one for one. Under NEM 3.0, the utility is disincentivizing using production credits as long term storage. They prefer you use or store your energy onsite; if you can export while costs are high, that's nice too.
Yes. The utilities want every household to pay them every month.
Here in California, PG&E has a "base service fee" of $24/month. That you owe even if they sell you no (as in ZERO) electricity:
https://www.pge.com/en/account/billing-and-assistance/base-s...
Seems reasonable if you want to be connected to it.
The grid costs a significant amount of money to build and maintain, and maintaining the available capacity to serve you electricity even if you only use it a couple months of the year (or even a couple days of the year) still costs money.
If you don't want to be connected to it at all - then I mostly feel you shouldn't be mandated to be.
Yep, totally, and I'd personally be overjoyed if I could pay PG&E (hypothetically; they're not my utility) $24/month to keep the grid afloat, but no more than that because I'm producing all I need locally (at the risk of repeating myself, I know this is possible today. Just hopeful that over time it becomes possible to do that install in a plug and play fashion just like you can do with the balcony solar, but at whole-house scale (or at least some material fraction of the whole house usage)).
If demand upon infrastructure decreases, then the infrastructure itself can also decrease.
We don't need to solve that problem in advance.
Hope this ends up being true, and that solving it in advance is not required because that would mean the utilities would not have pushed back. I just feel like they will unfortunately. But baby steps with the balcony seems like we're heading in the right direction. Just wish we'd move faster.
But then you have that week or 3 when you need all the infrastructure.`
Sure. Shit happens.
The system we have now is imperfect. The system we will have in 10 or 20 or 100 years surely will be imperfect, as well.
We must not let perfect be the enemy of good: If we do, then we'll never get anything done at all.
In power grids the system must be able to handle peak loads for weeks at a time. Either it will shed loads (aka shut off electricity) or things will explode. A black start cannot be allowed to happen as it would be catastrophic
Peaks don't last for weeks, but yes: Load must sometimes be shed.
That happens today. It will happen tomorrow. It's imperfect. This imperfect nature doesn't mean that progress must cease, or that all things must be forever maximalized in search of perfection.
i think that is an overly simplistic axiom: the utilities must cover a fixed asset base (poles and wires and transformers), pretty much regardless of how much or whether a household consumes from the grid.
the less the utility recoups via billing for energy usage, the bigger the deficit to cover their fixed network costs.
they are frequently interested in having you consume energy, to help defray those costs, especially where the marginal cost of the energy is very low.
the more users who disconnect, the more the fixed costs must be recouped from a shrinking customer base, triggering more incentive to leave the network. this is called the death spiral.
In addition, things like balcony solar don't save them cost: it introduces complexity because they need to safely manage that load, they need to be able to predict and measure it; in my experience working with utilities and network operators for many years, they flat out don't want these distributed generation sources unless they have a lot of say in how they are added to the grid, and how users can be charged for the privilege of generating their own power. that is often a very significant barrier to regulatory change.
that’s true, i was considering only the perspective of the major city i live in rather than networks with lower ratepayer densities where the economics are probably totally different
i do think “fully consumed or gated to never backfeed balcony solar at scale” is all i’m referring to, which i naively hope is a smaller regulatory change than backfeeding
> I do think “fully consumed or gated to never backfeed balcony solar at scale” is all i’m referring to, which i naively hope is a smaller regulatory change than backfeeding
I though the point of these systems was you plug them in to your wall socket and they lower your electricity bill. If you want to avoid tieing to the grid you can't have such a simple deployment.
Everything I have seen about balcony solar requires it to be grid dependent and cannot backfeed.
Regulation aside, a significant issue is physical area. Most people won’t have access to enough area in the right direction to make it a primary source.
There’s a legit grid stability issue for solar in general, balcony or no.
Usage varies second by second, so the grid relies on physical inertia in the form of rotating turbines. Panels have no inertia; therefore, the more you have the less stable the grid gets.
That is however something which can be fixed by grid-scale batteries. Or home systems, for that matter, if they have batteries and some equivalent of Victron’s PowerAssist.
(Which limits the rate at which power draw can change. Very useful when you use a house-sized generator; it amounts to synthetic inertia. I have a 7kW generator, but a 7kW step load would stall it.)
Plus /actual/ flywheels to compensate for non-synchronous generation: https://www.esbinternational.ie/case-studies/details/moneypo...
You would need supercapacitors, but you can make an inverter emulate inertia almost as well as flywheels, and more than well enough to not make a difference once you push the energy into a few kilometers of non-zero impedance grid.
supercapacitors are quite difficult because they can explode
I have some news about flywheels...
Ah, this is why I come here. I had no idea that was the case. I feel like there was a story going around recently about how hard it is to restart some power generator if it gets knocked offline. Maybe it was about Hoover Dam now that I think about it (i.e., how bad it would be if the Colorado gets too low).
A standard rooftop solar install with micro inverters is already pretty much plug and play. Wiring it up is the easy part.
Even a more complex system with large centralized inverters and battery backup can be about as plug and play as a desktop computer if you use an all-in-one inverter/charger/controller.
The challenge is scale. You can't take 10kW of solar and plug it into an outlet. It requires more hardware and wiring than that.
but you CAN just plug all of your stuff into the inverter.
It’s primarily a regulatory issue, and more states in the US will approve it over the coming years.
I don't see anyone replying to you here, and I don't know what your background is in this, but I think and hope you're spot on here. The more I've read replies in this thread the more I think this is mostly regulatory and maybe slightly a hardware issue (hardware issue is that there needs to be some kind of plug on an electrical panel that would remove the risks of having to pull the face off the panel, install a new breaker and connect the inverter).
I've worked in clean energy for about a decade, building analytics software for DER providers (solar, batteries) and EV companies, and I build large-scale portable battery and solar systems as a hobby. I keep up with the industry and the regulatory environment closely via podcasts, newsletters, and conferences.
It can't be more or much more than the 800W as currently done in Germany because it would not be safe with the way electricity is delivered to a home.
The reason is: when you pull electricity from the grid, the fuse would blow if you tried to pull too much current (e.g. you connect four hair dryers on the same outlet). It blows to prevent the wiring in your home from overheating and catching on fire. With balcony solar, you plug it in your home outlet which is already behind the fuse, which means the fuse cannot react and cut off power if you try to feed in more than the capacity allows. You could be maxing out on the current you are pulling from the grid, and then on top of that you would be adding your balcony solar.
Why it's allowed at all in Germany and other places is because the fuse will blow above 10A and the wiring in the house is 16A, so there was always a buffer or overcapacity in the wiring, presumably just in case. So they allowed 800W of balcony solar which is roughly 3.5A and still there is some wiggle room left.
Also why pull from the grid at all: your appliances actually just use the electricity from the grid. In Germany and I guess most of Europe they run a three phase system, so your balcony solar might not be in the same physical circuit as your appliances in use. With balcony solar your meter just offsets your consumption with whatever you are feeding it at the moment. From the grid standpoint if you are running something using 800W and feeding in 800W, it's 0.
Of course it can work without this too, but this defeats the purpose of balcony solar, which is plug it in and it works simplicity.
Another limitation is the transport capacity of each power line and each transformer (power lines and transformers don't care for the direction of the electricity, only for the amount of electricity).
For example if each house in a city would have 25A fuse and all the houses would simultaneously draw 25A, or simultaneously supply 25A the grid would collapse.
Usually the Diversity Factor for apartment block electric grids is around 35%.
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/electrical-engineering/diversi...
https://ecalpro.com/compare/demand-diversity-100-apartments
This is very interesting and helpful info! I guess my fantasy is that a standard electrical panel would eventually have a literal plug on it where you could plug a larger system in, just as you would an outlet in the balcony situation, and then it would I think be, using your word, in "front" of the "fuse" (using quotes because I'm not sure I have the behind/in front of language correct, and when you use fuse here in the states it would be a breaker, I guess, not an actual fuse). This solution would of course have to mitigate things like fire risk, or blowing up the house or grid itself. I'm just hopeful it's coming because I think the install rate would go through the, pardon me, roof.
The post you replied to isn't fully correct. I'll tell you how you could do this in many ways that prevents the fuse problem.
There's 3 ways to run solar.
Grid tied, grid backed and off grid.
I live on a farm and am off grid. The solar inverter is my "utility". After the inverter I have my main breaker. The inverter makes 5 kW max at 230 volts, so my fuse is 5000/230 = 20 amps.
I'm outside the US, regulation is a suggestion here everyone ignores. So many many houses have solar panels here to offset grid costs ($0.60 per kWh).
The main way we do it is make it grid backed. This means the inverter creates power that is in no way mixed with grid power. It forms a microgrid within the home. All ac's are connected to this. This can be done in the electrical panel as its just rerouting wires to fuses.
So then you have your 20A fuse behind the inverter, and smaller fuses (which you should already have) to your house loads. Btw you guys run 110v so your fuses are probably double the rating of ours.
When you do grid backed a battery is nice, since it helps prevent using the grid when a cloud passes by, it forms a bit of buffer. A 5kWh battery already helps. At night the grid powers the loads.
Grid-tied is the one nobody here uses, so you can feed back to the grid. This involves complicated electrical stuff so you don't electrocute the line workers. Plus it gets complicated with split phases and such.
Not to mention utilities pay less than what they ask you for the same kWh.
In the case of balcony solar you can feed the inverter utility power and connect your AC to the inverter. It uses solar power first and takes the needed diff from utility.
Know you don't want to dox yourself, but .6 is... rough. Like super rough. Would love to know where this is, but no pressure. Thankfully you're not relying on it completely. And oh what I wouldn't give to know the incidence of deadly maybe very-damaging electrical fires there given your well put "regulation is a suggestion here everyone ignores." Because if the incident rate is no worse than here you can make some assumptions that the regulations here are overly burdensome. I'd be remiss if I didn't say that regulations are oftentimes written in blood; it's true in the case of electrical generation, distribution, installation, but it's also a glib way to stand in the way of solutions that improve peoples' lives.
I think it's the reason why we ignore regulation. It's not really malice or greed, local government is just a mess. It takes months of waiting.
And when we "break the rules" we consider the rules and break them in a way that minimizes our liability.
Like the reason for the certified install is to protect the line workers. I live on an island, so that's basically my neighbours. Nobody wants them dead. Likewise nobody wants to go through bureaucratic hell.
Solution: grid-backed installs that doesn't interact with the grid. Which any Juan or Pedro can do if you don't want to do it yourself. It runs around $200 to add a new "electric group" to your house.
And to be fair the standard rate is 0.38 cents per kWh and some fixed rate. But the poor they force on the pre-paid package which has no fixed rate, but runs at that higher rate.
And so when you can't afford to buy the electricity you end up in the dark without giving the utility any moral obligations.
I live in the "Caribbean Netherlands", the largest island of the 3.
I imagine it could be done like thus, but it is not, there's no infrastructure like this, so it's a moot point. Balcony solar was allowed so it's a hassle free DIY solution. You also don't get any money for feeding into the grid, but because you save a lot of money on installation costs it's still worth it.
>how far are we from a more plug and play home solar system that becomes a primary energy source as opposed to a limited secondary source?
We don't need a more plug and play system. A zero agreement interconnection for whatever UL certified 300W-ish scale is fine and should be widely deployed.
There needing to be interconnection agreements with your utility and an inspection is not a blocker that needs to be removed. Most places require a licensed electrician for complex work, having the electrician fill out a form and having a utility inspection is how things should be.
Apologies if my reply here is not understanding you, but this is counter to my experience. Plenty of people still want to handle their own energy production even if they have grid access. I've built off-grid houses. Most of the utility production is already renewable. Many people still choose to live off grid even though that's the case. It would be epic if there was a plug and play, house-scale option because the cost of installation today is... epic (so epic in fact that the overall cost of install has actually gone up even though material costs have come down). Admittedly off-grid installs are a tiny fraction of places on the planet, but it's the trigger that led me to ask about this.
Perhaps you're just responding because I brought up grid tie (fair!), but I'm wondering why not aspire to remove the blocker, which would mean de-risking the installation so that laypeople could do it without having to get an electrician involved (which is what's so amazing about balcony).
If you want grid tie-in, a certified professional needs to be in the loop to verify all of the rules are being followed because incorrect setups are dangerous to other people. Also insurance probably doesn't want to insure your home if someone with questionable knowledge is setting up wiring and energy production.
Outside of cities, outside of grid tie, setting up your own micro-grid often can be done without any external intervention. You have to know things to do it though, I don't think it is a desirable state of things for just blind plug and play.
What you say is true, but do you not think there's a way to make it so that the risk is taken out of it so you can expand the number of people who are capable of doing the install? I mean, I personally think there is, but I respect you don't feel the same. I just end up with a $10,000 bill, for the labor, to do what seems to me like a very straightforward problem to solve.
I'm 100% certain you can do it yourself.
We get Chinese solar panels here. $175 and produces 550 watt.
We then get Chinese MPTT inverters, always 2 if you run your fridge on it lol. $350 ish for one. The 5kW model. It's all one and the same.
You need a minimum of 3 panels.
So for less than $1000 you have 1.5 kWh with no storage.
Connecting the panels requires some care to ensure you stay within the parameters all GPTs know. Two pictures is all it takes. The spec label of your panel and that of your inverter.
I can't stress enough how easy it is.
The output of your inverter is 1 phase power. You can route that anywhere in your house safely since houses have.. circuits. So once the circuited is moved to the inverters grid, its seperated.. at the circuit breaker.
The scariest part was driving a screw through my roof.
It's not straightforward. If you do it wrong you kill people. Your house burns down, you burn your neighborhood down, you electrocute utility workers doing maintenance, you contribute to grid instability which is already a tight balancing act.
Can you make plug and play possible? Sure but you're just shifting the verification to a different layer and then you have to make it illegal to posses or sell any thing but the safe engineered products and you have to spend a bunch on enforcement to make sure only the safe stuff gets put in practice (not to mention replacing all the existing hardware and making it illegal to maintain)...
Modern consumer products and safety rules insulate people so much from the dangerous parts of existence that people get bothered when everything isn't like that and then want to go pet the big stripey orange and black kitty... not realizing that guardrails and safety nets aren't everywhere in existence.
And putting up those guardrails is EXPENSIVE. You want those instead of professional installation costs? Sure but the solar system you bought just got 10x as expensive as a result saving you nothing.
A house costs what... $250-500k to build these days? $10k for a major update to the build is nothing. Requiring expertise to verify dangerous things are done correctly is appropriate.
Utah passed a balcony solar bill; I think they're the only ones so far. Oregon tried in the short session last year, but it got shut down by fire marshall type people, sadly.
I saw that Virginia and Maine have a little bit of momentum towards balcony solar. This is the video I saw that in: https://youtu.be/2RqhK2w8rrA
Interesting on Utah. Re Oregon, was the fire Marshall acting in good faith in that scenario? Recently reading about fire-truck size in the US I start wondering what the motivation is for some views about things around fire safety (amongst a million other things). Maybe good faith is too cynical. Maybe just hard-to-change attitudes.
Firefighters are infamous for creating elevator regulations that require being able to rotate a stretcher, which lead to less elevators duet to the immense costs, which is both completely unnecessary and defeats the entire purpose of the regulations for safety since now they have to drag injured people down stairs
They are also dragging their feet on 'single stair' reform, despite single stair being perfectly safe with adequate construction techniques
https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/2025/02...
Its especially egregious because 2 stair builds are easily and often designed with more distance between stairs and rooms than single stair builds are.
Hah - I was going to mention all the other types of things the fire people seem to be blocking, but decided to stay focused. But yeah, it seemed like 'aversion to change'. "Firefighters might trip over solar panels on balconies" or something kind of far-fetched sounding.
This is funny. You might notice that I write insanely-long comments because these types of things pop into my head every time on HN (better get ahead of it because people will pick apart my quick comment if I don't cover as many bases as possible in the original comment!). Your method is better! I have to learn how to be more "focused" and let folks just do their thing and then reply succinctly like you did here.
Good plan.
The US currently is at per capita GHG emissions approximately at the the same level as it was in 1910.
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/co2/united-states
Despite not being in the paris treaty, the us needs only a 10-12% reduction to meet the paris accord requirements on schedule (43% decrease by 2030).
The Paris Agreement deals with total emissions. Unlike previous climate treaties, it doesn't specify a baseline year. If you use 2005, as the US was supposed to use, the 2030 target is ~3.5 billion tonnes. 2024 emissions were ~4.9 billion tonnes. If you use a 1990 baseline, as in earlier treaties, the US target becomes ~2.9 billion tonnes.
US population has been basically stable (+10% over the past 10 years), so per capita (in terms of the paris agreement timeframe) is a reasonable proxy.
Yes, but it was most recently at the same level between 1939 and 1940, according to that graph.
And total US GHG emissions are currently at about the same level as they were in 1988.
US consumers and businesses buy almost all their stuff from China. China's massive footprint of Coal should be added to US emissions.
Good point. But one factor is China is also greatly reducing their emissions. For instance, their pollution levels have plummeted after enacting strict controls:
https://epic.uchicago.edu/insights/china-has-quickly-and-sha...
Still, that is a good point, a lot of the emissions from manufacturing have been shifted to other countries.
>China is also greatly reducing their emissions
Are they? because looking at these charts[0], although fossil fuel use as a percent of total energy may be going down, the absolute values for coal, gas and oil only go up year over year.
[0]https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china#what-sources...
Aye, but that data is up to 2024, here's an update: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...
"flat or falling" let's be honest. The amount of "fall" in that graph is basically in the noise. It's been flat.
Sure. Difficult to say much from so few datapoints alone.
On the other hand, the apparent cause suggests the trend will continue.
On the other other hand, perhaps China will suddenly decide to build 100 GW of data centers meaning they ramp all the existing coal plants up to 100% load.
I'm mostly hopeful, but not absolutely so.
It's still a big change from the previous status quo. I've been checking on absolute emissions on various industrial countries for a while now and this is the first time I've seen them actually flat (and not decreasing as a fraction but increasing in absolute terms)
Ah, right. Yeah, I've been reading about their incredible decrease in pollution overall, and not on just their C02 emissions. Didn't know these had still been rising over the years, and it's really only in the two years have these been falling too. Still, amazing turn around.
> US consumers and businesses buy almost all their stuff from China
This is not really the case, China is the US' #3 trading partner, and trade-corrected GHGs are also down (see the graph further down the page), actually by an slightly better percentage off-peak.
China’s massive coal footprint is shrinking due to successful, intentional effort under the most recent five year plan, and coal’s presence in China’s power mix will likely continue to shrink, while China ramps up exports of clean energy technology to the rest of the world.
In absolute terms, china's coal footprint is increasing, and will continue to increase in the short term, as of early 2026, they were still opening new coal plants.
Their coal capacity is increasing, but the utilization is continually falling.
China is a semi-planned economy. The coal plants are more a form of insurance than a practical and economical source of power.
China is shifting it's coal use from direct burning in coal power plants to coal based oil, gas and chemicals, reducing the need for energy imports that could be cut off in a conflict. Carbon, in form of CO2, will still be released to the atmosphere from this products.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/chines...
Not just the US, a lot of developed countries have outsourced the problem to China (or other countries) to look good on paper, and tanked their local manufacturing as a by-product. It will be interesting how history records this moment.
The trend has China installing as much solar capacity as the rest of the world combined every single year within a reasonably small margin.
Batteries taking over gas peakers is the next milestone I’m looking forward to. We will need gas generation for base load for quite a while due to the pure infrastructure that exists.
I do fear that natural gas may end up as a Nuclear scenario where in we do not wholly embrace natural gas Fuel Cells that produce electricity with no emissions. Yes you have the fracking issue but the US owns that environmental damage within its borders instead of outsourcing mineral extraction to poorer countries. We solve the biggest issue with fossil fuels (emissions) while working on limiting environmental impacts on extraction. It’s also way less noisy than gas turbines and can be scaled to basically any size.
Bloom is the gold standard right now but I hope they get strong competition soon, I truly believe/hope that Natural Gas fuel cells are a massive piece to the future energy puzzle.
Not sure that will come to pass. With the drop in price of both solar and batteries being not only continuous but accelerating, we're quickly approaching a tipping point where it will become uneconomical to not replace anything grid-tied fossil-fuel with solar/wind+battery.
Quickly being in the next decade or two.
To be clear, fuel cells are considered "low air pollution" because they eliminate certain nasty combustion products (NOx), but they still produce as much CO2 per kWh as a gas turbine.
Arguably that CO2 stream is concentrated and a candidate for capture/sequestration, but no one is doing that in practice.
I work in clean energy, and whenever I read comments like those in this thread I realize there’s so much that I take for granted that is still relatively unknown outside my bubble.
It's somehow still early innings for the energy transition, and there are a lot of fun engineering problems to work on. Join us, start here: climatebase.org
I told someone about UBI and they hadn’t heard of it, 4 or 5 years ago, despite being an executive at a charity that is supposed to help people with food money.
This administration is hitting milestones without even trying!
Hehe, it is actually trying very hard not to hit the milestones.
No, the clean energy industry is doing that, it’s a large and growing industry with billions of capital deployed and millions of people working hard across technology and policy to make it happen.
Funny, I initially read the OP title as
> Solar generates more energy in US than coal for the last time
Then the actual title is what confused me for a second.
Easy, the previosu government destroyed coal for solar, it is easy that way.
Oil next.
USA became top 1 oil exporter, so we'll see how that goes
Note that coal is dropping precipitously, which increased the effect.
There was an article recently about how the West Asia war is quickly decarbonising South Asia. Lot of solar and wind projects in the pipeline for SA countries. Especially because now renewables are a national security issue
You mean the "US-Israel war of aggression against Iran"?
Let's not avoid assigning responsibility when it is so clear.
> West Asia war
Oh, snap, did Turkey attack Cyprus again? :-p
What West Asian war? Isn't Iran firmly in the Middle East by any reasonable definition?
West Asia is a less Eurocentric than “Orient” or “Middle East.” I like it.
LOL
"Asia" is a Greek name, fully Eurocentric.
The entire continent doesn't even make sense. Geographically, sure, culturally, absolutely not. It should either be Eurasia or probably about 5 different continents (South of Himalaya aka Indian subcontinent, North of Himalaya aka Siberia + Central Asia + China + South East Asia, South of Caucasus + Kopet Dag aka Middle East, etc).
But the correct term is West Asia and not middle east
(I live here and yet I didn't know it until this was shown as West Asia war on the news)
The entire region needs a better name. It's own name, something that's not meant to be "in the middle, between more important regions", "west of what people consider more important".
I was actually thinking about that and stuff like "Fertile Crescent" would be more neutral (but it risks not covering places like Arabia).
I wonder if locals have a generic name for the entire region that's more appropriate.
The middle east is in Asia, no?
don't worry this administration is giving nearly a billion dollar bailout to coal using war powers so congress can't block
* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/04/trump-coal-d...
They could have used it to retrain coal workers or help them transition to some other job instead of a handout to plant and mine owners.
But then normal people would have more money, and centi-millionaires would have less.
Apparently, both are against the US government's policy.
The centi prefix means one hundredth, as in centi-metre.
So a centi-millionaire would have only 10 thousand :-)
You mean a hecto-millionaire.
In other news:
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/united-states
In 2025 US produced from solar 388.82 TWh, from gas 1,807.34 TWh.
So solar has long way to grow to replace gas in US electricity production.
That shift is going to happen a lot quicker than people expect, here's the expected 2026 US grid additions:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67205
- Solar: +87 TWh/year (assuming 23% capacity factor, lower end of US range)
- Gas: +9TWh/year (6.3GW new, 4.6GW retirements, higher end of US capacity factor of 60%) https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67206
This is in the face of massive growth for grid demand for the first time in decades, so the trend will accelerate.
New gas turbine manufacturing capacity is tapped out, causing new gas CapEx to get more expensive:
https://www.woodmac.com/press-releases/gas-turbine-prices-so...
Meanwhile solar and storage are continually plummeting in price.
So the current trend of approximately all new generation being renewables is going to accelerate. And then it will start eating into older, existing generation assets, causing early retirements of existing gas generation capacity.
Most investors think that any new gas generation built today will be a stranded asset long before its end of life. That doesn't matter to the hyperscalers, who run them so poorly and hard that the turbine shafts die in a few years and can afford it, but for regular utilities, buying any new gas generation is a boondoggle meant to soak the ratepayers and capture the guaranteed profit rate.
And the numbers above ignore residential solar, which will further lessen demand for gas, and as the cost of transmission and distribution soar on the grid, residential solar becomes an always better deal, because it skips all that.
The global cost-minimum for a future grid will have gas on it for maybe 20 more years, but not much after that. We'll switch to lots of storage and tons of over-capacity of solar and wind.
It will be interesting to see how solar evolves in the coming decade in US, maybe it could reach the current share of gas produced electricity, 40% . The country with the highest share of solar electricity is Hungary 27%, but they are part of the European electricity grid with lot of export and import.
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/hungary
Gas turbine manufacturing factories are very expensive and gas turbine manufacturers have already experienced turbine market crashed in 2018. Nobody wants to sit on loans for expensive idle factories in 5 years when the AI hype stops.
https://www.primary.vc/articles/the-gas-turbine-bottleneck-r...
Per MWh costs of residential solar are usually 2x per MWh costs of utility scale solar. Utility scale solar power plants buy and install solar panels at larger scale and cheaper.
Most places can't run on residential solar + battery 365 days in year and need grid connectivity. As more homes install residential solar + battery the grid costs, which are independent of the number of hours when the grid is used, will stay the same. The amount of consumed gas will be lower. The costs of building gas power plants will stay the same (they are the backup), the costs of maintaining gas power plants will increase (more frequent ramping up and down).
"Ramping damage in gas turbines refers to the wear and tear or stress that occurs as a result of frequent changes in the operating load, also known as load cycling. Gas turbines are designed to operate efficiently at steady-state conditions, and deviations from these conditions can lead to various issues"
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jeff-shan-a8962b36_ramping-da...
> Per MWh costs of residential solar are usually 2x per MWh costs of utility scale solar. Utility scale solar power plants buy and install solar panels at larger scale and cheaper.
The only problem with this comparison is the cost of the grid, which at least in the US will dwarf the savings from doing utility scale installs.
One nice thing about residential solar is that it greatly reduces the need for transmission, while perhaps requiring some short-term enhancement on distribution. And ideally dumping a bunch of storage at grid distribution nodes in the form of a container of batteries would solve a ton of problems and reduce costs a lot. This is of course heavily resisted by utilities because in most places in the US they make their money on T&D costs, so cutting those is a threat to their existence.
The US has literally double its total electricity production in solar and batteries stuck in the now 5 year FIFO permit hell we require for grid additions that will cause most proposals to pull out before completion
On the other hand.
Here we are reading about solar overtaking coal. Coal was producing more grid electricity than gas relatively recently, in 2015.
The rate of growth of solar-produced electricity is accelerating. Given another decade, there's every chance it can supplant gas as well.
I like it.
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48477729
> Solar supplied 12.8% of US electricity in May even as Trump boosts coal over clean energy
People at this point should realise that Trump is lying.
He also does the same with regards to Iran.
It is time to not only look at the Epstein connection, but also the corruption in that whole family dynasty. There has never been as much theft, I claim, as with that dynasty. (And Epstein plays a role because superrich partied with underage girls, and they told Trump to shut down all investigations. This is corruption in its final stage. Same here - Trump babbles about old energy but his superrich friends expand on renewables. And profit. As always.)
See that's why the cool kids are moving to clean coal /s